i agree completely, if you would like to have particulary orderd structure of data it is better to use @arrays they have indexes that sorts your data in particular way , %hashes are special for their keys that are associated with some value. i mean, you could sort those keys like this:

sort keys %hash;
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but to do it in a particular order you would somehow have to index those keys. top of the head solution;

%hash = ('dog' => 1,
         'big' => 5,
         'jak' => 4,
         'mack' => 19);
@array =  qw(dog mack jak big);

foreach  $val (@array){
        print "$hash{$val}\n";
        }
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in this way you are doing, in a particular order something with your %hash values. i suppose this isn't exactly what you had in mind but...