Hi Gianluca,

Take a look at this thread on MSE. I don't ever use Part with Association because it's behavior is not intuitive, at least to me.

Association[a -> b][[1]] (* Your example *)
(* b *)

Association[a -> b][[1 ;; 1]]
(* <|a -> b|> *)

Association[a -> b][[{1}]]
(* <|a -> b|> *)

Thank you so much Rohit. You helped me notice something that somehow I had missed. Towards the end of the example in the documentation they use the Part approach and I guess my mind got stuck on it, I was simply surprised when I noticed that the [ ] worked, and frankly, I prefer it.

Again, thank you for clarifying this for me. Now off to my code to replace all those uses of [[ ]] with [ ] when used with associations!