On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 03:48:05PM +0000, Smylers wrote: > jrod...@hate.spamportal.net writes: > > > On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 01:48:40PM +0000, Smylers wrote: > > > > > jrod...@hate.spamportal.net writes: > > > > > > > On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 08:09:39AM -0500, Ricardo SIGNES wrote: > > > > > > > > > 1.80 means 1.800000. 1.95.1 means 1.095001. > > > > > > > > How in the nine hells of software hate doesn't it mean 1.950001 or > > > > some such crap? > > > > > > Because (I believe the reasoning goes) if 1.95.1 mapped to 1.950001 then > > > what would 1.100.1 map to to ensure it's greater? > > > > But how *doesn't* this apply to 1.80? > > It does if you tell it that 1.80 is a version number. > > But Perl (unsurprisingly) also supports floating-point numbers, for use > with maths and things like that. And obviously such numbers need to be > tret as such, not as version numbers. > > And, unfortunately, Perl (like most other languages) uses the full stop > rather than the decimal point for floating-point numbers. > > Which means that it has to guess whether 1.80 is a representation of the > real number 1.8 or a version number where "1" is the first part and "80" > is the second. Unless there is any evidence to the contrary it chooses > the former -- which makes sense, given that computer programs do > arithmetic much more than they process version numbers. > > v1.80 is unambiguously a version number, because floating point numbers > don't start with a "v". > > qv(1.80) is unambiguously a version number, because qv() is a function > which is defined as interpreting its argument as a version number. > > 1.8.1 is unambiguously a version number, because real numbers don't have > multiple full stops in them. > > 1.8 could be either, so is treated as a floating-point number.
Rubbish.
We're talking about Perl, not some other language. In Perl, how something
is treated doesn't depend on how something looks, but on its context.
perl -E 'say 1.8 . "a"'
Heh! 1.8 ain't no floating point number, it's a string!
Furthermore, I make my versions typically as follows:
our ($VERSION) = q $Revision: 1.8 $ =~ /[\d.]+/g;
$VERSION is a string. Perl never gets the idea that $VERSION is a
floating point thingy. Yet, as a version, it's treated as a larger version
than 1.799, and a smaller version than 1.801.
Besides, 1.8.1 isn't unambiguously a version number, it can also be
a string, as the following example shows:
$ perl -wE 'say 83.109.121.108.101.114.115'
Smylers
$ perl -wE 'say v83.109.121.108.101.114.115'
Smylers
qv() is a function that isn't available by default, it's found in the
version package - so it's only unambiguously if you know that the qv()
you see is an alias for version::qv.
$ perl -Mversion -wE 'say qv (83.109.121.108.101.114.115)'
v83.109.121.108.101.114.115
$ perl -Mversion -wE 'say qv (v83.109.121.108.101.114.115)'
v83.109.121.108.101.114.115
$ perl -Mversion -wE 'say qv ("v83.109.121.108.101.114.115")'
v83.109.121.108.101.114.115
$ perl -Mversion -wE 'say qv ("83.109.121.108.101.114.115")'
83.109.121.108.101.114.115
Man, sometimes I feel so tempted to put things like
$VERSION = 'yellow';
in my modules.
Abigail
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