When I say "any specific sorted order" (e.g. whether it's insertion order or ascending value order or whatever) I mean as opposed to unsorted order. That is, no

When I say "any specific sorted order" (e.g. whether it's insertion order or ascending value order or whatever) I mean as opposed to unsorted order. That is, not necessarily randomized but necessarily unspecified and not to be relied on. Randomizing is the most explicit example of unsorted order. Go is fairly serious about language stability and they want to hold onto some guarantees for the remainder of Go 1.x. In order to be able to achieve this, they need to be careful about what explicit features they commit to as much as what implicit features people end up depending on. If changing an implemention of a datastructure changes the implicit order of how keys are stored and the entire community has grown to depend on the original undocument order as a feature... then that's a big problem. > Are you coming from a C++ background? I don't think it particularly matters in this case, but the majority of my programming career so far was spent in Python. :)