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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42806
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42806
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think you may be overthinking the issue.

In technical writing when you name three entities with elements of a specific subset, the ordering of the specific subset doesn't come into play unless it is specifically stated. There are plenty of examples where the common "A,B,C", or "X,Y,Z" are used without underlying assumptions of "who come firsts" or "who is more important". Luckily enough, technical writing is somewhat shielded from those kind of controversies.

Answering your question, though, you could try:

- Assign full names to your entities. This is often done in telecommunications examples or in cryptography (_Alice and Bob, exchanging messages..._). If you don't like inventing name, you could use the Nato Phonetic [alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet). To be sure, following an alphabetic convention won't free you of an underlying order. Another drawback of this soluton is that full names are not concise; if you have a lot of entities to name, you'll see your text fill up with Alices and Bobs.

- Use a color coding. Your entities can become Red, Green and Blue. This is somewhat assimilable to the alphabet, since you can easily shorten those to RGB. Yet, if you pick your names from colours, nobody will be able to claim that you are making assumptions about who's more important.

Original score: 9