Strictly speaking there are no associative arrays in ScriptBasic. Rather arrays can be used in associative mode. This implementation of associative arrays is simple and is powerful enough to use small arrays with a small amount of keys. The typical use of associative arrays is to get a feature like record in PASCAL or struct in language C. Note that this type of storage is less than optimal in case it is used for a huge number of keys and values.
Searching the keys in the array is linear. It means that accessing a single element needs time proportional to the size of the array. The external module "hash" provides an implementation, which is much more powerful and much faster for large associative arrays.