Fostering reliability, maintainability, compactness, and good performance in code has been a constant quest for programmers and language designers over the years. It's rare that one technique can give you all of the above benefits, concurrently. But intelligent use of associative arrays can do that. If you haven't yet tapped into the power of associative arrays, you might want to give the issues involved some thought. The issues are widely applicable to a variety of programming tasks, cutting across all major languages.