From: David Naseby <david.naseby@...>
Date: 2004-03-03T14:33:01+09:00
Subject: Re: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution?

>From: Ruby Baby [mailto:ruby@hitmedia.com]
>
>In PHP, this is no problem.  I get the hash, and I can do the 
>"each" iteration on it, and get my top-selling albums in order.
>
>In Ruby, it's an unordered jumble.
>
>Why is that?
>
>And what do you think is the Ruby way solution for what I need to do?

Simplest solution: use an ordered hash implementation, such as rbtree
(http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=ruby-rbtree).

Hashes are unordered pretty much by definition (a convenient definition can
be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table). Its possible that PHP
hashes, by default, are rb-tree based.

David Naseby
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~naseby/