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Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

I like Donald Knuth's approach to versioning. Each new release of TeX has one additional digit appended, the most recent version being 3.14159265. The version numbers asymptotically approach π, suggesting the code is converging towards (but never quite reaching) perfection.

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That’s amusing but at the same time I’m glad I don’t have to interact with any software doing anything like this.

The flip side, the stability he chose is impressive. Not stability in "doesn't crash," but in "everything built on this is still standing."

Legend has it that when Knuth dies, he'll to change the version number to π exactly, at which point all remaining bugs will become features and the software will achieve perfection.

More than just legend! Knuth wrote:

>My last will and testament for TeX and METAFONT is that their version numbers ultimately become $\pi$ and $e$, respectively. At that point they will be completely error-free by definition.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html

And at the same time admitting that perfection is impossible. Brilliant.

P.S. on my screen your pi symbol π looks too much like n, I was confused for a moment.

It can be easily converted to a practical system: https://github.com/FrozenVoid/Infodump-DB/blob/main/versioni...

What if he hits a zero?

Given that last version is 3.14159265 he certainly isn't worried in hitting 0 anytime soon.

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 50

3.14159265358979323846264338327950...

So not for a while

Theoretically, the version "number" in this case is technically not a number, because you wouldn't do any math operations with it, it's more like a string. So 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 and 3.14159265358979323846264338327950 are two different strings.

Practically, since TeX will have no new features as they only fix bugs now and the last bugfix release 3.14159265 was 7 years ago, I think we'll actually never get there.

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