Its called Table in most systems:
OO systems that provide the concept of an Interface support swapping out implementations transparently. Java specifically does this Collection <- List <- ArrayList, LinkedList, etc.
C++ supports this as well. Python supports this. C would not support this directly.
Dependency Injection in the languages that support this would making plugging concrete implementations in and out configurable as well.
Java: For a extremely generalized interface Guava has the
Tableinterface and enough specific implementations to cover almost all cases.Lua really on has one collection type and that is
Table.
A Table interface can serve all the general purposes of an Associative Array as well as a random access normal Array if you just use numbers for the keys.
