alt Hacker NewsThere's one problem with arrays that I haven't seen mentioned here or by the OP: when inserting a key-value, the type of the key may change. For instance ["4" => "four"] === [4 => "Four"]
This can lead to some unexpected behaviors. For example, I've already been bitten by `array_merge()` whose result is different if its parameters are arrays with numeric indexes.
array_merge(["4 " => "four"], ["5 " => "five"])
// ["4 " => "four", "5 " => "five"]
array_merge(["4" => "four"], ["5" => "five"])
// [0 => "four", 1 => "five"]
The key type changing is generally not a problem per se, but it's definitely odd with the default re-indexing behaviour depending on whether something is integer keys only or not.
That's exactly what I've been complaining in my post above. If there were no automatic reindexing, then this wouldn't be a problem either.