I mention it because pg makes a fairly good point about using alists.
"There is a tradition in Lisp going back to McCarthy's 1960 paper [2]
of using lists to represent key/value pairs:
arc> (= codes '(("Boston" bos) ("Paris" cdg) ("San Francisco" sfo)))
(("Boston" bos) ("Paris" cdg) ("San Francisco" sfo))
This is called an association list, or alist for short. I once
thought alists were just a hack, but there are many things you can
do with them that you can't do with hash tables, including sort
them, build them up incrementally in recursive functions, have
several that share the same tail, and preserve old values"
Of course none of this negates anything in akkartik's response. I just think there are some helpful tips in the tutorial.