Any chance of multi-dimensional arrays?

[Rene Herman]

Good day.

I know that bash arrays are 1 dimensional -- but are there any plans for 
providing multi-dimensional arrays?

I'm currently writing a larger bash script to manage my (ogg vorbis) 
music collection, including maintaining tags. Vorbis files can and 
(mine) often will contain repeated tags such as, say, "artist=David 
Crosby" and "artist=Graham Nash" and so on and as such, my "artist" 
variable is an array.

However, the same things holds for any tag and I'm currently managing 
separate title, artist, genre, date, album, tracknumber, disc and 
discnumber arrays with fairly ugly "manual loops", whereas I would much 
prefer to call them "tag[i]" instead and loop over them with actual for 
loops. Given that tag[i] is itself an array, I can't do that though.

When you google for this issue, you find various contrived emulations of 
multi-dimensional arrays through function-accessors and such, but that's 
not really what I want to do. Thought I'd see if a suggestion that 
multi-dimensional arrays would really be much welcome would be welcome 
here...

The things I'm trying to do with this script seem to most naturally 
belong to the realm of scripts and as such, I'm reluctant to switch to a 
different language. And, in fact, I'm sort of satisfied how this is now 
working. It's just that the code would much improve from 
multi-dimensional array support.

Kind regards,
Rene