In Javascript, arrays and objects are different but many people treat them the same. This causes no end of grief because of the underlying differences in what it means to be an object versus what it means to be an array. An object is in essence simply a hash table or a dictionary. Another term for this construct, the term that I believe is responsible for much of the confusion, is "associative array."
The two constructs: hash tables and arrays are fairly similar in intent if you look at them in just the right way. Generally both imply a performant data structure for storing and retrieving data. These structures differ in their implementation, but fundamentally they both provide a way of associating a key with a value. Hash tables allow you to associate an arbitrary key with a value whereas arrays only allow numbers for the keys. Granted, there are usually some caveats to the numeric keys used for arrays. For example, they usually contain an upper and lower limit. But what why does this matter? It matters because this is how Javascript sees an array: as a hash table with numerical keys among some other non-numerical keys. Did I just blow your mind? Probably.
In this regard, arrays in Javascript are no different from any other object that shares the same characteristics. Where it differs is in the fact that an array is an object that is built into the interpreter and therefore has some special privileges granted to it, the main one of these being the "length" property which contains a value one greater than the largest numeric key.
Along with arrays and maps generally come looping constructs. Javascript has several, but the most common when working with objects and arrays is the "for" loop which comes in two flavours: the vanilla C style for loop and the less flexible but just as tasty for-in. The for-in loop iterates over the keys or properties of an object, not its values. It doesn't matter what type of object you're looping over, it will always iterate over the keys. For standard arrays both work fine, for example:
But what happens when someone starts monkey patching arrays, or adding extra properties to an array. Well, the for-in loop will cheerfully give you those keys as well. Maybe this is what you want, but I would guess that if you're looping over an array you probably want its contents not its properties which unfortunately Javascript treats the same.
The take-away here is that arrays and objects in Javascript are fairly similar. The language treats both of them in a universal manner which is refreshingly simple on one hand while jarring on the other. The language, like other dynamic languages assumes that the programmer knows what he is doing and stays out of the way.
