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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I can think of is that storing a version as a number would allow you to check if your version is incompatible with another server or feature / extension. By using less than or greater than.

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Not necessarily.

2.2 is greater than 2.12 but v2.2 is actually an early predecessors to v2.12

That would work if padding is always forced (like date). And in this case, it actually is.

2.02 is smaller than 2.12

Best hope you don't end up releasing 2.100 then

It can also ends up as 2.99.01. Jokes aside, there is another bug caused by some poor programmer hard-coded the length of version field recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702128

that is exactly why you would create a transformation to something like a big fat integer with each segment of the version number isolated to separate parts of the bit mask so you can compare it as an integer.

If they were stored as characters you could still do a string comparison using greater than and less than signs and logic.

"202201010001" > "202112122359"

evaluates to True in Python, SQL and many other languages.

But "1000"<"999" in Python.

But the format and length for these numerical strings is fixed.

This is going to be a problem in about 8,000 years tho.

String comparison works as long as you order your date time by significance and zero pad all values, which they were doing with their date stamp anyway.

Plus if they weren’t then even numerical comparisons would fail eg 1012021 (Oct/1/2021) < 5102020 (May/10/2020) so you argument is moot.

Wouldn't it be done more like this though?

  "%04d%02d%02d" % (999,1,1)

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