jrod...@hate.spamportal.net wrote:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 03:19:21PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 12:15:23PM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote:
On 2008-01-15, at 10:03, David Cantrell wrote:
Then stop calling them version NUMBERS.
While you, and other people, continue to do so, then people will
assume that "hey, it's a number" and "I can do numbery things with
it".
If a programmer thinks that just because something's a number that
means you can do "numbery things" with it, they need remedial training.
Given that it's a *version* *number*, adding them, multiplying them, and
so on, obviously aren't useful. But comparing them clearly is useful.
(not really drectly at anyone, but a followon)
These numbers maybe. But there are all sorts of numbers we don't
compare at all, except the most snarky computer programmer way, like
phone numbers or social security numbers or personal identification
numbers you use to insecurely access your checking account.
I think it's already been said, or maybe it went by on Twitter, but there's a
special layer of hell for DBAs who store phone "numbers", social security
"numbers" and PIN "numbers" as numbers. They're identifiers and should
probably be treated as strings or, even better, some specific unique
identifier type.
And while one might argue that version numbers, too, are identifiers they do
have the critical distinction that they are compared to each other for
something other than equality and <=> is a very simple expedient.
--
Hating the web since 1994.
