Basic error in numerical sorting of album names

[simoncn]

(12-01-2014 03:36)Andre Gosselin Wrote:  I tend to sympathize with DavidL here, and I think the sort could sometimes be done in a more "natural" way.

As a first example, if on Windows you create the following four files:
t-1.txt
t-10.txt
t-20.txt
t-2.txt
you will see that they are displayed in that following order in Explorer "detail" view :
t-1.txt
t-2.txt
t-10.txt
t-20.txt
So Windows routinely sort "numbers" in a natural ascending order inside file names. On Linux, one can try this :
% touch t-1.txt t-10.txt t-20.txt t-2.txt
% ls -v t-*.txt
% t-1.txt t-2.txt t-10.txt t-20.txt
On Linux, the '-v' switch can be set to sort numbers in a "natural" ascending order inside file names.

I find the Windows Explorer sort order very strange and not at all natural. Until this post, I found it completely inexplicable why the folder 0.8u1 is sorted before 0.20a. Thanks for explaining that this is intended to be a "feature" rather than a bug as I had assumed.

I wasn't aware of the -v option in Linux. It is described on this page. From this description, it seems rather complex and has some aspects that may not seem natural.

It seems clear from the discussion so far that what is natural to some people is unnatural to others. For this reason, I don't intend to change the default sort order, which is very clear and simple as well as being efficient. (With a large library, good sorting performance is important to ensure user responsiveness.)

I will do some experiments to see how iTunes handles this.