How to use associative arrays in Ada 2005?

["snoopysalive" <matthias.kistler@gmx.de>]

Hi!

Can anybody explain me how to use associative arrays in Ada 2005? I
mean hashes like in Perl. Some background: I'm a student of
Computational Linguistics and try to get away from Perl which I find
not efficient enough (at my university, Perl is the standard language
used by the professors). In my opinion, C++ is cool but Ada's syntax is
better to avoid dirty code.

So, when I say "hash", I mean something Perl-like like
"$hashname{key1}{key2} = 'something' ". Or something C++-like like "map
<string,int> hashname; hashname["key1"] = 42;".

Is there anything similar in Ada 2005, too? I bought the book
"Programming in Ada 2005" by John Barnes but I don't understand the
author's way of explaining a programming language (for me, the book is
more confusing than explaining).

Or does anybody know a good tutorial similar to the lots of C- and
Perl-tutorials? I found many Ada-tutorials but most of them just list
the contents of the built-in packages and don't explain how to use
them. As a beginner this is confusing.

Thanks for every answer!

CU,
Matthias