“Natural” sort order

I’m trying to sort records using a more “natural” sort order.

By which I mean that given a text field with records:

1

2

10

A

B

C

etc.

will sort to user’s expectations (in other words, not like this):

1

10

2

etc.

There’s a great algorithm for this:

http://www.davekoelle.com/alphanum.html

However, implementing in Filemaker is problematic, to say the least. Prior to version 10, filemaker wouldn’t be able to iterate the calculation properly, and even in version 10 it’s incredibly slow.

If anyone is interested, attached is a file with sample data, and some attempts at getting this to work.

alphanum.fp7.zip