An Associative Container for non-bash Shell Scripts

Introduction Have you ever found yourself stuck with having to write a *nix / *nux shell script that cannot assume that Bash and system core utilites having GNU extensions are available and so specify the shell processor simply to be /bin/sh and then found you could really use some sort of container to store multiple values? This happened to me a while ago and I thought I would attempt to create an associative container abstraction that could be used with only basic shell facilities.