I believe what you saw on the chatterbox was perhaps a bit of word play.

An associative array is as The Dictionary of Data Structures says, an abstract concept that extends the idea of a data structure indexable by numbers to an array indexable by keys, or by the association of a key with a value.

It may be implemented in a number of ways including the way that Perl chose, a hash table or hash for short. Ideas like this are present 'natively' in many modern languages and in libraries in older ones. They are called many names, often deriving from their implementation, including collections, dictionaries and hashes.

An Associative Array is then the general term to apply to all of the above. For instance it is notable that the term is not present in any of the indexes of Knuths Art of Computer Programming, specifically vol 3. Hashing however is covered in detail and is considered to be a subset of the over all problem of searching, along with Binary Trees, Linked lists, B+Trees, etc.

HTH

Yves / DeMerphq
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