[tom_mellior]

> In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence.

But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis

In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Yeah, and reading Latin is complicated by the fact that Latin authors like to put the adjective and its noun on oppposite ends of a phrase and then stuff other things in between. So, instead of "the yellow car in my driveway that belongs to my brother" they'll say "the yellow in my driveway that belongs to my brother car". Because an adjective must match its noun in number, gender and case, the authors think of the noun and adjective as holding the phrase together. And this is only the beginning: in poetry there are even fewer patterns because the words are generally ordered to fit the meter: the only thing you can really count on is that certain particles must be the second word in a sentence (important because the manuscripts didn't have punctuation) and that a preposition always precedes its object.

[monster_group]

Pretty much everything you said about Latin holds for Sanskrit too. Sanskrit has additional complication 'Sandhi' - euphonic combination [1]. There are many rules which are used to combine words depending on the ending sound of the first word and the beginning sound of the second. And you can keep on combining words as long as the rules are applicable. So you can get very long words without a break. Newbies often struggle with this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

[monster_group]

Yes, in most cases the sentence will still mean the same unless it's a very complicated sentence with multiple nouns and adjectives where there may be some ambiguity as to which adjective goes with which noun (and that too only if declensions happen to be in the same case). Having said that, the most common sentence structure used is still subject-object-verb.

[akssri]

It is for the most part (see answer above).