If you're worried about it in your app, you could always do class OHash < Hash ; end And use OHash as a marker that you're taking advantage of the ordering

If you're worried about it in your app, you could always do class OHash < Hash ; end And use OHash as a marker that you're taking advantage of the ordering features. Over time, though, I think this will be a real plus for people learning programming via Ruby. Non-ordered hashes are non-intuitive if you don't know what "hash" means, and think it's just a dictionary.