Indeed you can, and that's what's so great about it. I have, for instance, a function that returns the results of a database query as an array. I want to keep the order that the entries were returned in, but at the same time I want to be able to access them _either_ by the position _or_ by some other index (such as some sort of ID in the database, gotten from elsewhere). In this case, I can make the function return an array from id to [array of values], and by a simple call to array_values() this is transformed into an array indexed from 0 to count()-1. Useful.