> Well, apparently all these operating systems have decided that no, users are too dumb and they cannot possibly understand what alphabetical order means. So when you ask them to sort your files alphabetically, they don’t. Instead, they decide that if some piece of the file name is a number, the real numerical value must be used.
Well, no. You don't actually ask them to sort in alphabetical order. You ask them to sort "by name", and that is up to their interpretation. And they choose the interpretation that (per their reasoning, and possibly some actual data) seems most likely to correspond to what the user wants.
Maybe future versions of those OSes will add a rule that says that if any of the number groups have leading zeros then it reverts back to actual alphabetic order. Or maybe they'll give you configurable options. (Maybe some of them already do.)
Clearly a leading zero means the number is in octal (but only if all the subsequent digits are between 0 and 7). I think that would lead to the most intuitive results.
> And they choose the interpretation that (per their reasoning, and possibly some actual data) seems most likely to correspond to what the user wants.
Yes, that make sense, but the problem is that this interpretation changed in the last 10 (15? 20?) years. It used to be that "by name" meant "by name, il alphabetical / lexicographical order" in pretty much every file manager.
Well, no. You don't actually ask them to sort in alphabetical order. You ask them to sort "by name", and that is up to their interpretation. And they choose the interpretation that (per their reasoning, and possibly some actual data) seems most likely to correspond to what the user wants.
Maybe future versions of those OSes will add a rule that says that if any of the number groups have leading zeros then it reverts back to actual alphabetic order. Or maybe they'll give you configurable options. (Maybe some of them already do.)