a nice side effect - index can now be "compressed" - e.g. just 1 bytes, 2, 4 or more. Such approach comes useful in GC languages too, as you limit the work a GC has to do, going through the roots, checking anything that can be a pointer.
Indeed. If you take that to the logical conclusion, you reach the K/J/APL mindset - objects are not a useful abstraction. Just use arrays with correlates indexes and be done with it.
