Yes, patches aren't commutative in general. That is precisely the reason Pijul can help us in these situations, and guarantee the result will be the same: it wi

Yes, patches aren't commutative in general. That is precisely the reason Pijul can help us in these situations, and guarantee the result will be the same: it will either work without issue, or it will abort due to non-commutative patches (it's similar to a type checker, which either guarantees that functions won't be called with the wrong type of argument, or aborts because the types don't match up) From my understanding, the 'history/ordering mechanism' in Pijul is composition of patches. In general, the patch 'patch1 ∘ patch2' can be different from the patch 'patch2 ∘ patch1'; when they just-so-happen to be the same, we say that patch1 and patch2 commute.