Upon a little reflection, it occured to me that MATLAB does in fact have the ability for a rudimentary native hash-table:
terms = { 'price' 'cents' 'govern' 'billion' 'company' 'state' 'economy' 'stock' }; ids = num2cell(1:length(terms)); dict = reshape({terms{:};ids{:}},2,[]); dict = struct(dict{:}); dict.('cents') % my two cents!
Of course one could also use java:
dict = java.util.Hashtable; dict.put('key',[1 2 3]); dict.get('key') dict.containsKey('key')
