@avdudchenko - Oop, can you please undo your last commit? You used black . instead of black -S -C ., which introduced a bunch of non-functional changes.

@avdudchenko - Oop, can you please undo your last commit? You used black . instead of black -S -C ., which introduced a bunch of non-functional changes.

Done.

Thinking about this PR, I am wondering if we should remove the sorting from tabular_writer all together? That was originally there because of Python < 3.7 when dict ordering was nondeterministic. Now that we are past that, the sort is no longer necessary for determinism. One path forward could be to:

• remove sorting from tabular_writer
• move the sort to the methods that generate the data dict for the tabular_writer. Right now, that is just in various implementations of display and pprint.
  • this would let us leverage the "deterministic" mode for component iteration as the default
  • we could even expose the sorting to the user through a sort= option to pprint/display (using the SortComponents standard

One additional thought: this would break backwards compatibility for the generated ostream, but not functional compatibility. This change could impact tests that rely on diffing those strings.

One additional thought: this would break backwards compatibility for the generated ostream, but not functional compatibility. This change could impact tests that rely on diffing those strings.

I honestly think keeping backwards compatibility is better, especially if we are concerned about tests.