dict[`he.*`] == [4,2] could also hold. Or maybe [...] was a set literal and not ordered list.
Interesting ideas, perlish in spirit, somehow less cryptic.
Was it published ? was there other ideas you could talk about ?
I know nothing was published or released. I actually left BNR/NT less than a year after the language went into production (going to say July, 1990) - I don't really know how long it remained there. Perl was popular, and Tcl was definitely a 'thing' in the lab at the time - the writing was on the wall for home-grown languages.