>>In movies, they call it "cast in order of appearance". We could derive some better term using that as a guideline. How about older/younger objects, regarding their order of birth?
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>Yes...I'm proposing a new idea here, there will be an initial ordering of same-level objects called TOrder, based on temporal (like birth) order. Unless overridden by ZOrder (which really should be strictly limited to stacking in the Z-plane, the TOrder will be the primary instantiation order....

Next thing that comes to my mind would be a TOrder builder, which would have a nifty little moverbox, and then leave the objects to instantiate in desired order, and then warn the user that relying on instantiation order is not the best thing in the world.

(two hours later:)

I've written this builder just for the heck of it, but there's a slight problem - the form won't save the new order of objects, unless at least one of them gets a BringToFront or SendToBack done from a menu or a toolbar. I could invoke one of these if I knew the names of the objects on the layout toolbars or the name of the Bring To Front bar of theFormat menu, and if I knew how to select a particular object from a builder.

The builder, as it is, will be sent to Files simultaneously with this message.