I feel like it's not intelligence or lack there of, it's that implementing sort with a[i] < b[i] is the simplest way to do it. Putting 9 before 10 would require

I feel like it's not intelligence or lack there of, it's that implementing sort with a[i] < b[i] is the simplest way to do it. Putting 9 before 10 would require some kind of windowing since otherwise you'd be comparing 9 and 1, and of course 1 is smaller.