"Hashes" are intended to be lookup structures: given a "key," they give you a "value," and they do it very fast. But, they have no idea of "order." If you want to present the values "in a particular order," you need to use a separate numeric field, then either `ORDER BY` that field in a database query, or `sort` the values in Perl. If you need to preserve ordering between multiple runs of the script, then you have to store the order-value persistently.

Remember also that in Perl you can build more than one data-structure simultaneously which "references" the same data. For instance, you could walk through the hash, add the references to an array, then sort the array. Now, each element will have two references to it: one from the hash, and the other from the array.

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