I've never looked to deeply into this because I've always found a way to do things without them, but they make life so much easier in my PHP and Perl scripts.  Do the exist in a fashion which I could use with ease and if so, where/how?

To my knowledge there's no standard hash table avaliable in a C++ library, but there's a map from STL which is similar.  Do a search on "std::map"

Plegh, I was hoping there was.  Thanks.