It’s more confusing. I thought the article was correct when they said -10 coming before -9. Why? Because they were talking about the strict alphabetical sort. They are already prepending zeroes to force the comparison to be 10 vs 09. So, yes, they were talking about ascending order, but not natural ascending order, but ascii sorting order where 10 is before 9 because the comparison isn’t 9 vs 10, but 1 vs 9.

It was only clear to me because I could guess where they were going. They were complaining about natural sort vs alphabetical sort, which is a case I’ve run into many times, so I could see the argument coming.

The irony to me was that they were already altering how they named files to fit what they thought the computer wanted by prepending a zero to get a proper alphabetic sort. And even after that, some computers didn’t follow their idea of what it should be doing.