There’s no hash table/map in Inform 7. Tables are just two dimensional arrays.
My Data Structures extension (for 6M62 only) does include a map kind, but it is not a hashmap. Its performance is not good if you use lots of map entries, but it’s still basically a prototype. I’ve proposed incorporating it into the core of Inform in the future, in which case we’ll use a hashmap or btreemap or something.
Inform tends to stick to natural language phrases, even if very wordy. Authors are free to make their own shortcut phrases as they like.