How to initialize an associate array nicely with awk

I am trying to initialize an associate array with awk, for example, to
map literal months to numeric months, I did something like:

BEGIN {
    mon["Jan"] = 1; .....; mon["Dec"] = 12;
}

Is there some other ways to do this with awk(gawk)?? for example, in
Perl , I can do things like:

 my %mon = ();
 @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 qw/Jan Feb Mar Apr May.... / } = (1..12);

Thanks in advance,
LH