Here I've got to differ. The alphabetical-order rule was introduced to nail down the order of execution of operations that were going to happen in any case, but would otherwise have happened in an unspecified order. You are proposing to let it define what gets executed and what does not. I don't think that's a great idea --- for one thing, it raises the ante quite a bit as to whose idea of alphabetical order is definitive. But more importantly, such a change will certainly break existing applications, and you haven't offered a sufficiently compelling reason why we should do that.
I do think the behavior I outlined an improvement over how the system behaves at present, but I agree it is probably not worth breaking backward compatibility for.
-Neil
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