Comparing Raw Values of the Age Property

Manuel Strehl via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Tue May 23 04:33:24 CDT 2017


The rising standard in the world of web development (and others) is called
»Semantic Versioning« [1], that many projects adhere to or sometimes must
actively explain, why they don't.

The structure of a »semantic version« string is a set of three integers,
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, where the »sematics« part lies in a kind of contract
between author and user, when to increment which part.

I do _not_ suggest Unicode to embrace that standard, merely stating, that
that is what many frontend developers will simply assume when looking at a
version string, that matches this pattern.

--Manuel

[1] http://semver.org/

2017-05-23 8:43 GMT+02:00 Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:

> On 5/22/2017 3:49 PM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
>
>> One of the objectives is to use a current version of the UCD to
>> determine, for example, which characters were in Version x.y.  One
>> needs that for a regular expression such as [:Age=3.0:], which
>> also matches all characters that have survived since Version 1.1.
>> Another is to record for which versions of the standard a character had
>> some particular value of a property.
>>
>
> Richard,
>
> I would tend to side with those who claim that "version number" is
> something that's defined by common industry practice, and therefore not
> something that Unicode needs to define - but is allowed to use. Just like
> Unicode doesn't define what an integer is, or hexadecimal number system or
> a whole host of other concepts that are used in defining in turn what
> Unicode is.
>
> As Markus implied, version numbers are a positional number system where
> the positions in turn are integers in decimal notation, separated by dots.
>
> As it is neither a "string" nor a single number, neither of those common
> sorting methods give the right answer, but a multi-field sort will.
>
> If you have a multi-field sort algorithm that uses commas as the
> delimiter, just swap out the dots for commas. If not, then you have to
> implement your own multi-level sort.
>
> In any well-designed modern runtime library you can pass a comparison
> method to any of the sorting algorithms (or sorted data collections).
>
> A./
>
> PS: somewhere in the standard, Unicode does define names for the fields:
> Major, Minor and Update. The use of the term "Update" may not be universal,
> but major and minor version numbers are a well established concept and do
> not need a definition. The naming also implies the order of precedence.
>
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