Yes, but I hope nobody really relies on that ordering in their code, as, as you say, it is pretty inconsistent. Eg. you can't rely on dict_b_keys = iter(dic

Yes, but I hope nobody really relies on that ordering in their code, as, as you say, it is pretty inconsistent. Eg. you can't rely on dict_b_keys = iter(dict_b) for key in dict_a: value_a = dict_a[key] value_b = dict_b[next(dict_b_keys)] print(f"{value_a} == {value_b}: ", value_a == value_b) The problem with the proposal is that it will be even stronger: you either require '*' to sort in-place (I assumed that would be even worse and thus unacceptable, so I ignored that case — it seems others believe that to be a more realistic implementation), or require dicts to maintain a half-sorted map of integer keys.