Wikipedia's definition supports mine. In fact it says explicitly: "Associative arrays are very closely related to the mathematical concept of a function with a finite domain." You undoubtedly think that when it parenthetically refers to "sets" in: "each key is associated with one value (or set of values)" that it is therefore allowing general relations as opposed to restricting to functional relations. Its not. Set theory reifies the "set" as a value.

Appealing to the group is no argument at all. I don't care how many "monks" say something -- especially when it isn't even wrong (to quote W. Pauli). For instance, I never took issue with the desirability of expressing relations. I just don't like it when people go about doing stupid implementations of lookups. When people try to justify it by saying relations are valuable, it just multiplies the stupidity with irrelevance. When I show how to do a better implementation of relations just to play along and am further insulted, it progresses from stupid to comical.

In reply to Re^18: the annoying keys "key" and "value" by jabowery
in thread the annoying keys "key" and "value" by jabowery

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