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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

No, it makes sense to sort strings when you get handed strings, and sort numbers when handed numbers. Period. Default behavior is now exactly as expected by 100% of developers.

Your creativity as a language designer should only come in to play when dealing with sets of mixed type.

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So how should [1, "a", 2, 3] be sorted by default?

Both Python and Erlang would return [1,2,3,"a"], Ruby and Clojure won't allow the comparison. Either of these approaches makes more sense than JavaScript's.

Javascript returns [1,2,3,a]. What's the problem.

    > [1,2,"10",3].sort()
    [ 1, '10', 2, 3 ]

That's the problem.

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