I was with you until this point, but 1.2 is bigger than 1.10, because 1.2 is a shortened version of writing 1.20 _unless_ you explicitely want these to be version numbers or something like that. The normal expectation would be to treat numbers as, well, mathematical numbers, and not SemVer, especially if we only have one decimal point, don't you think?

> But assuming your original list is a list of versions (which seems reasonable given the presence of multiple decimal points for some cases), then that’s the order you’d want.

What level of assumption is here expected from the sorting-system, would it have to process ALL entries of the list to find multiple decimal-points and then assume that they are ALL versions and not numbers?

How to treat this on different locales, where the decimal point is a comma and thousands-separator is a dot. Should the locale then also be considered by that system? Also when listing the folder of a remote-system with a different locale?

What about dates, should that system attempt to sort entries with multiple date-formats (yyyy-mm-dd, dd-mm-yyyy, dd-MMM-yyyy,...)?

The topic is far more complex than this narrow example. If we expect such a system to alter its sorting based on some data format interpretation, there is a risk of misinterpretation which might make the whole list unusable...

There is a rule that works for all cases. It's lexicographical sorting.

Simple. Consistent. Easy to manipulate to get what you want.