[rbehrends]

> The "glue" languages that succeeded did have support for arrays etc.

For what it's worth, Tcl has had support for O(1) array indexing since 8.0 in 1997. That's because starting with 8.0, Tcl values had both an efficient internal representation and an external string representation. It's not a perfect solution, because it's not always transparent when (inefficient) transformations between representations take place, but it's definitely possible.