I stumbled across this solution, and found it fell over when it met the likes of the following: qw{ 1.01 1.3 1.02 1.2 };

$A <=> $B does a numerical comparison, but strips any leading zeroes from the number, so how 1.02 and 1.2 are sorted will depend on their original order in the list

No, the spaceship operator  <=> does no stripping of any kind, it does a numerical comparison, and numbers don't have leading zeros , 0002 is 02 is 2

The problem is with the code/regex, which turns decimals into an array of integers , and then does a numerical comparison on each portion -- not gonna work

I'm not too familiar with Tcl's sort order, but what works for me (esp for mp3s) is to lowercase the string, and pad all digits with zeroes (sometimes 6, sometimes 20) 

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict; use warnings;
my @list = ( qw{
bigBoy bigbang bigboy x10y x9y x11y 
1.01   1.3   1.02   1.2
x1.1y x1.01y x2.3y x2.1y } );

print join "\n", 
  map { $$_[0] }
  sort { $$a[1] cmp $$b[1] }
  map {
    my $f = $_;
    $f =~ s/(\d+)/sprintf '%06d',$1/ge;
    [ $_, lc $f ]
  } @list;
__END__
1.01
1.02
1.2
1.3
bigbang
bigBoy
bigboy
x1.1y
x1.01y
x2.1y
x2.3y
x9y
x10y
x11y

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In reply to Re^3: Dictionary-style sort a la Tcl? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Dictionary-style sort a la Tcl? by argathin

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