What hash/map based programming language exist?

Question

Much like lisp is often considered a list based programming language what languages are considered map based?

I remember reading about one a few years back, but can not longer find a reference to it. It looked something like:

[if:test then:<code> else:<more code>]

edit: and more where quoted code blocks which would be conditional evaluated. In this fashion if/cond and others would not be special form as they are in lisp/scheme.

The syntax above is supposed to be map/dictionary like just like lisp's syntax is list like.

if would be a key with the value of test.

then would be a key with the value of .

...

Answer 1

The obvious answer would be lua -- it uses tables heavily, and a table is pretty much a hash map (an associative array). Its syntax doesn't look much like you've shown above though.

What you have above looks quite a bit like Smalltalk, which certainly includes hash-based containers in its library, and the typical implementation uses hash tables internally to look up how an object should respond to a particular message. Nonetheless, calling it "hash/map based" seems like a bit of a stretch, at least to me.

Answer 2

It's not quite what you describe, and it's not really hash-based, but your example looks a lot like Smalltalk:

test
  ifTrue: [code]
  ifFalse: [more code]

Update:

Your edit, "and more where quoted code blocks which would be conditional evaluated. In this fashion if/cond and others would not be special form as they are in lisp/scheme", suggests to me Tcl.

In Tcl, {} simply quotes a string. "If" is a command that evaluates the test, and then selectively evaluates another parameter based on that result.

I wouldn't exactly call Tcl a hash-based language, though hashes are kind of special in Tcl.

Answer 3

I'd suggest Lua too. The whole language is based around tables - objects are tables, their definitions are tables, variables are in tables, tables define scope, etc etc - where a table is a hashmap.

Answer 4

The snipped you post looks like Objective-C very much, although is isn't map based in implementation, only the syntax looks like that.

One language that to my understanding uses dictionaries heavily is Python. Basically Python ( in my own words ) is a very big dictionary, but the syntax doesn't quite reflect that.

This is my source ( probably of confusion though )

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/index.html#_python_understanding

Answer 5

The MUMPS programming language has one base datatype which is essentially a hash/map, but be careful learning about MUMPS. There be dragons...

Answer 6

That looks very much like MISC, a lazy Lisp with maps instead of lists as the fundamental datatype. (It's also lazy, has deep integration of metadata (similar to Clojure) and a couple of other things, but it is still very much a Lisp: functional, homoiconic, macros, implemented as a metacircular interpreter, all the good stuff.)

Here's some code samples from the blog:

[if [> 5 10] then:[+ 5 10] else:[- 5 10]]

[let '[square:[lambda '[x:1] '[* x x]]]
    '[square 12]
]

[take 20 [numbers from:0]]

Unfortunately, it seems that besides two blog articles from long ago, there's not much going on anymore.