yes Awk is - similar to JS - using the same datatype for Arrays and Hashes, but ...

> Awk does not have numerically-indexed arrays at all.

Awk has implicitly numbered arrays like ARGV

And ARGV[1] corresponds to $ARGV[0] in Perl

Similarly will awk's split() index the first element with 1 in the resulting "array".

And the first field from auto-split is $1 not $0 , while perl -a will put it into $F[0]