Using associative arrays

…You may recall that back in the movie operators and arrays, I mentioned that…arrays are one of awk's most powerful…features and that I'd talk about them later.…Well, now it's later.…If you've used any other programming languages at all,…you are probably familiar with arrays with numeric subscripts.…Such as array sub 1, array sub 2 and so on.…As you've seen, awk handles this type of array quite well.…But this is just a special case of awk's array handling.…The fact is, that in awk, an array…subscript can be any number or string whatsoever.…

For example, we'll define a new array called a, and we'll assign…to its element first, that is a string, the value of field 1.…Likewise, we'll assign to the subscript second, the value of field 2.…And to third, the value of field 3.…Then we'll print them in reverse order.…We'll use the standard input for this, and so if we put in one, two, three,…you'll see that one is assigned to the…element of the array labeled with the subscript first.…

Two to second and three to third and these…