For some applications (eg sticking stuff in an ordered data structure), you just need any consistent ordering, but don't care too much about exactly which one.
It's ridiculous to what lengths you have to go to understand which part of a string comes earlier or later.
Simple example: semantic versioning allows "1.2.3alpha" and also 1.2.3-beta", but which one comes first now...
- Is 1.2.3 > 1.2.3omega?
- Is 1.2.3 > 1.2.3beta?
- Is 1.2.3gamma > 1.2.3?
In the Linux world it gets even funnier cause they invented SONAME fields that reflect breaking API changes instead of forcing packages to comply with semantic versioning syntax. Oftentimes there is a package version of e.g. 0.4.7 that has an SONAME of 12.7 on the filesystem.
Add to that the ~prerelease suffix syntax in Debian based distros which are maintained downstream, and all the +buildid or .commithash or -revision123 suffixes and you've landed in string comparison hell.
When I started I would have never guessed that this is such a complex problem to solve in golang.
Perhaps I missed it, but I thought [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/) required a “-“ between the patch number and a prerelease identifier since at least version 1.0.0 (with 1.0.0-beta allowing a “.” instead of a “-“), no?
No, according to the spec, the hyphen is mandatory: "A pre-release version MAY be denoted by appending a hyphen and a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch version."
MAY has not the same meaning as MUST. MAY is optional, MUST is mandatory.
1: https://semver.org/#backusnaur-form-grammar-for-valid-semver...
- Is 1.2.3 > 1.2.3omega? No
- Is 1.2.3 > 1.2.3beta? No
- Is 1.2.3gamma > 1.2.3? Yes
I wrote this example, because I knew the answer. And your interpretation (the same as my initial one) is wrong :)
> Pre-release versions have a lower precedence than the associated normal version.
> 2. A normal version number MUST take the form X.Y.Z where X, Y, and Z are non-negative integers, and MUST NOT contain leading zeroes. X is the major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is the patch version.
What about Go makes this different? That's how I'd solve this is any language
For a simple example, perhaps this is a list of strings that require Unicode normalization to be properly interpreted as human text that you are storing into a TreeMap for efficient retrieval. When you are adding "\u00f1" to the list, you wouldn't want the collection to say that it's already there because it already had "\u006e\u0303".