[cliffy]

The problem is PHP calling an ordered map an array. Array in pretty much every other language means a sequence indexed by integers.

Ideally the maintainers of PHP would rename it and deprecate the use of `array()` over a long period of time.

[zeroimpl]

The PHP documentation refers to them as "associative arrays", which is technically correct, but I agree I'm not sure how they could have conflated these concepts so badly.

[tyingq]

I believe the "associative array" terminology came from Perl. Though Perl's associative arrays don't have any guaranteed order. And Perl also has normal arrays.