Re: RFC 84 (v1) Replace => (stringifying comma) with =>

[Russ Allbery]

Stephen P Potter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> What stops us from imposing order on this chaos?  If they are currently
> defined as not having any specific order, why can't we say they always
> return in numeric || alphabetic || ASCII || whatever order we want?

Because the fewer guarantees you make, the more efficiency you can get.
The above would prevent a hypothetical future smart Perl interpretor from
reordering your hash behind the scenes in another thread while your
program is using it to optimize for the usage pattern that it's seeing,
for example.

If you have to guarantee a sorted traversal of the hash keys, your choices
of data structures are *far* more limited.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>