I have an old engineering program that uses tcl as its scripting language... stuck on a version that predates dictionaries.

Without dictionaries complex data structures are quite difficult, and people will abuse the heck out of the language to create them. I was just looking at an example where some poor engineer was inventing a "data structure" by using string manipulation to create & modify variable names. Some of the variable names he derived were also defined as globals, so there was that too.

Prior to dictionaries, tcl only had arrays, which are the least string-like things in the language.