“There are additional complications in certain languages, where the comparison is context sensitive and depends on more than just single characters compared directly against one another,
[…]
Numbers. A customization may be desired to allow sorting numbers in numeric order. If strings including numbers are merely sorted alphabetically, the string “A-10” comes before the string “A-2”, which is often not desired. This behavior can be customized, but it is complicated by ambiguities in recognizing numbers within strings (because they may be formatted according to different language conventions). Once each number is recognized, it can be preprocessed to convert it into a format that allows for correct numeric sorting, such as a textual version of the IEEE numeric format.”*
I think those file browsers made the right choice, even given that they don’t (as in this example) always do the right thing.
“There are additional complications in certain languages, where the comparison is context sensitive and depends on more than just single characters compared directly against one another,
[…]
Numbers. A customization may be desired to allow sorting numbers in numeric order. If strings including numbers are merely sorted alphabetically, the string “A-10” comes before the string “A-2”, which is often not desired. This behavior can be customized, but it is complicated by ambiguities in recognizing numbers within strings (because they may be formatted according to different language conventions). Once each number is recognized, it can be preprocessed to convert it into a format that allows for correct numeric sorting, such as a textual version of the IEEE numeric format.”*
I think those file browsers made the right choice, even given that they don’t (as in this example) always do the right thing.