Sounds good to me

Cool, so this is simply to remove the entrypoint to dictionaries (not their existence), right?

@kronz @Racel This is being pursued as an experiment at present. I'd really appreciate if you can read up on lua's tables, because it might explain some of the rationale for associative arrays in DS: https://www.lua.org/pil/2.5.html

print(a["x"]) --> 20 s very confusing to me. Just because b=a, why would a=b?
and then a=nil --now only 'b' still refers to table is also strange

I love the last line "You can introduce subtle bugs in your program if you do not pay attention to this point" :)

I understand the rationale now, but even after reading this, I believe that separating dictionaries is the right thing to do which will make for clearer UX for the user and better UI strategy for us in the future

So, tables in Lua seem pretty cool, and there defintely seems like a common rationale. I'm with Racel, that a cleaner UX around list v dictionary behavior through seperation still seems like a better approach. "Simple, Coherent, Capable". Tables in Lua certainly seem Capable, but not simple.

BTW, just for fun, if you put some of the same code in identified in the link into a CBN, you get some pretty nutty results:
a = {};
k = "x";
a[k] = 10 ;
a[20] = "great";
(a["x"]);
k = 20;
(a[k]);
a["x"] = a["x"] + 1;
(a["x"]);