> Display strings in a consistent, documented, manner.
IMO, "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent. I'm not sure if it's documented—I've never needed to look up the documentation—but if it's not, the developers could certainly fix that.
> this is your preference for a specific situation.
Sure, but we generally make decisions based on which situations we think will be most common. I think having ten or more things (screenshots, audio samples, whatever) named "Thing 1" – "Thing 10" in a folder is extremely common. And if Thing 10 comes before 9, it's really annoying!
Let's say I have a directory of 32 numbered files. Under the author's preferred sorting method, they'll get displayed:
1
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
2
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
3
31
32
4
5
6
7
8
9
If I download a folder with files like this, I basically have to pause whatever I'm doing and edit the files to have leading zeroes before I can make sense of what I'm looking at.
IMO, "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent. I'm not sure if it's documented—I've never needed to look up the documentation—but if it's not, the developers could certainly fix that.
> this is your preference for a specific situation.
Sure, but we generally make decisions based on which situations we think will be most common. I think having ten or more things (screenshots, audio samples, whatever) named "Thing 1" – "Thing 10" in a folder is extremely common. And if Thing 10 comes before 9, it's really annoying!
Let's say I have a directory of 32 numbered files. Under the author's preferred sorting method, they'll get displayed:
If I download a folder with files like this, I basically have to pause whatever I'm doing and edit the files to have leading zeroes before I can make sense of what I'm looking at.