Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2014-08-17, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: >> A blog from Nick Coghlan >> http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2014/08/python-4000.html that >> should help put a few minds to rest. > > I agree with the comments that the appellation for "simply the next > version after 3.9" should be 3.10 and not 4.0. Everybody I know > considers SW versions numbers to be dot-separated tuples, not > floating point numbers.
I consider versions to be *strings*. They include non-numeric components such as "a", "b", "rc", so they aren't numbers. They're certainly not floating point numbers, since they have a variable number of decimal points. Although there is at least one unofficial standard for interpreting version numbers (semantic versioning), the most popular by far is "whatever I mean by it today" and the only reasonable interpretation of an arbitrary software package's version "number" is as free-form text. Given two version numbers for the same arbitrary package, X and Y, just about the only thing you can be sure of is that if X < Y, Y is *probably* newer. > To all of us out here in user-land a change in the first value in the > version tuple means breakage and incompatibilities. *All* of us? So... you're not a user of the Linux kernel? http://www.linuxplanet.com/news/goodbye-linux-2.6-hello-linux-3.0.html Or Java 5, 6, 7, 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history Or Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/956361 (I believe that Firefox is now up to version 31, with version 32 due at 3:00pm and 33 due at 5:30pm.) And not a Mac user either, I imagine, since Mac OS introduces major backward incompatible changes to point releases. Mac OS version X tends to prefer version *names* rather than numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_OS_X which Debian-based Linux distros also tend to follow. Or for that matter, not a Python user either: https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.0.html Version 4.0, when it comes out, will merely be a return to past practices in Python-land, which are quite similar to practices in many major software packages. Version 3.0 was the anomaly. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
