Thanks for the explanation. Because I failed to decipher the strange word, I did not get the joke, not even the point. 'Associative array' is a rather long name. However, I still would have preferred it over 'hash'. When I was first learning Perl, I naively thought of an array as a structure which associated values with integers and A 'associative array' as a special kind of array which associated the values with strings instead of integers. The syntax for accessing values from either one is consistent with this view. The name 'hash' is not misleading simply because it does not offer a hint about how to use the structure or what it might be used for.
