Hm. Sounds like you're trying to start YAPS (Yet Another Perl Shibboleth). You'll excuse me if I do not wish you well with that.

1. The alists & plists stuff is a read [intentially sic] herring:

   because, (to the best of my very limited Lisp knowledge), neither can perform the fundamental operation of both associative arrays and hashtables: that of random access of values by key.

   To the best of my knowledge, access to both is strictly sequential from the head.

2. The implementation details are irrelevant:

   because associative array is an abstract datatype defined in terms of its operations. It can be implemented many different ways.

3. The implicit ordering is a misnomer;

   You are conflating the order in which the data is accessed when iterated, with the ordering of the data itself.

   • Nobody except the rawest newbie expects AA/hashtables to be ordered.

     And when they do, its for the wrong reasons. As LW is reputed to have said: "iterating over the keys of a hash is like clubbing someone to death with a loaded Uzi".

   • Saying that ordinary arrays have implicit ordering is equally a misnomer.

     If you iterate an array in ascending index order; shuffle the contents and again iterate by ascending index, the data (values) will be differently ordered.

   • The pseudo-randomising of the hash seed for security reasons has as much to do with the iteration order of a hash, as the type of lock on a door has to do with the order people will come through it in the morning.

     The hash seed does not determine the order of iteration. That is (and remains) the sequentially ascending sequence of the bucket array (with diversions for non unitary buckets), just as for arrays.

     The hash seed simply determines which bucket the key/value pair is mapped to. Ie. It affects insertion not traversal.