Techniques have been developed to facilitate evaluation of match and hash rule entries in ways that allow an implementation to decouple (i) the order in which match rules are applied to a first subset of packet header fields from (ii) the ordering of a second subset of packet header fields over which a non-commutative hash is computed. In short, the set and ordering of fields evaluated in accordance with a precedence order of rules need not correspond to the set or ordering of fields over which a hash is computed in a communications controller.