On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 7:51 AM, David Golden <xda...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dotted-decimals have a "round-trip" problem when being compared to > decimals. Depending on the order that things are converted, you can > get different answers. > > Consider "v1.2.1000.3". How should that be converted to a decimal > version? At the cost of both readability and backwards-compatibility, prefixing each part with a length digit 0-9 where 0 means 1 and 9 means ten would give a round-trip capability for parts up to ten digits long while preserving the ability to sort numerically after converting to floating point. Add a final 5 always to prevent trailing zeroes getting lost and annoy rounding algorithms. v1.2.1000.3 would become 1.0231000035 v1.2.999.3 would become 1.022999035 -- I like to think that when I ramble on, I'm speaking for others who share my opinions or point of view but who aren't as expressive.
