> > Does a hashmap guarantee an order? > > No, it definitely doesn't. > > I guess the reading-between-the-lines assumption that I didn't quite say > is: I think most (if not all) of the users of sorted string lists don't > actually care about a particular order. They just want efficient lookup. > > > I thought we had an example of an ordered list in the submodule code > > but could not find it, maybe it is gone already or did not rely on the order > > as I thought. > > > > It turns out we make never use of a custom compare function in > > the stringlist, which helps gaining confidence this use case is nowhere > > to be found in the code. > > Plenty of code uses the default strcmp. You can find users which assume > sorting by their use of string_list_insert() versus _append(). Or ones > that call string_list_sort(), of course. Here comes my reading-between-the-lines assumption: When using the default comparison function, you probably only care about the efficient lookup as described above, but if you had a non-default order, then we'd have strong evidence of the contrary as the author of such code would have found reasons why that order is superior than default order (and don't tell me a different order helps making lookups even more efficient, this must be another reason).
