In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an Abstract data type that stores a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection. In mathematical terms an associative array is a function with finite domain. It supports ’lookup’, ‘remove’, and ‘insert’ operations.
[…] The two major solutions to the dictionary problem are Hash tables and search trees.
Bibliography
“Associative Array.” 2022. Wikipedia, May. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Associative_array&oldid=1086435023.