Given two raw values of the Age property, defined in UCD file DerivedAge.txt, how is a computer program supposed to compare them? Apart from special handling for the value "Unassigned" and its short alias "NA", one used to be able to compare short values against short values and long values against long values by simple string comparison. However, now we are coming to Version 10.0 of Unicode, this no longer works - "1.1" < "10.0" < "2.0".
There are some possibilities - the values appear in order in PropertyValueAliases.txt and in DerivedAge.txt. However, I can find no relevant guarantees in UAX#44. I am looking for a solution that can be driven by the data files, rather than requiring human thought at every version release. Can one rely on the FULL STOP being the field divider, and can one rely on there never being any grouping characters in the short values? Again, I could find no guarantees. Richard.
