The problem of persisting arrays usually leads to handling them in bash.
Now you have two problems.[1]
[1] If you paraphrase Jamie Zawinski in an explanation, you then have two things to explain.
And I still think Shell, Awk, and Make Should be Combined. In that world you'd still have one problem :)
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=awk#awk
Oil has recursive data structures, although I'm still working out how to compose shell-like "procs" and functions which could return an associative array. We could just add them both naively but I think it would cause many shell programs to be a lot messier.
- they don't have any garbage collection or ref counting
- they don't have recursive data structures
- you can't return any kind of array from a function