Other people have talked about hash arguments to routines; I'll look at a more general aspect.

The key advantage in my mind is organizing or clustering data into categories. I am defined by my clothing sizes, degrees, vehicles, etc. My degrees are defined in terms of the courses I took, the grades I got, the assignments I completed. My studies in "History of the Modern World" doesn't care about my clothing sizes or whether I have a skateboard. Aggregating data into hashes instead of independent variables creates a context, it makes it easier to understand relationships.

As Occam said: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

In reply to Re: Benifits of using hash rather than number of variables? by TomDLux
in thread Benifits of using hash rather than number of variables? by tart

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