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> Lua tables accept arbitrary objects as keys, and make a difference between `foo[1]` and `foo["1"]`.

That sounds... completely normal? Python dictionaries will do that too. So will Java HashMaps.

That comment was responding to a comment about PHP and JS, both of which do not make such a distinction.

There is another subtlety that values associated with integer keys are stored as an array. dicts and HashMaps don't do this.

And not even all integer keys! Lua will efficiently handle sparse arrays using tables.