0 in version number?

[Shriramana Sharma via Digitalmars-d]

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> Windows doesn't follow any of the proposed versioning schemes (I mean,
> what's up with 3.0 -> 3.1 -> 95 -> 98 -> 2000 -> XP -> 7 -> 8 -> 9... ?

Heh -- nice point. But they market the visuals and the interface, not the 
version numbers. Nevertheless, lots of questions turn up on forums about the 
version numbers – like actually there isn't a Windows 9 (unlike you hastily 
mentioned above), is there?

I agree that D should have better marketing and hope the new Foundation will 
do more in this regard, but I don't see any serious *detrimental* effect of 
the current numbering scheme on the marketing. But it does seem somewhat 
*unprofessional* to have a meaningless zero therein. I was curious about it 
and more people (potential future users) are likely to have the same 
question. And you want people spending time using the language in actual 
programming, not writing forum posts asking why there's a zero (and replying 
to it)...

And I don't think this is the kind of thing that is supposed to stand out 
about D. "What, D? Oh you mean the language with the strange versioning 
system?"... Nah.

TeX (and MetaFont) have a strange versioning system, but that's not what it 
is known for, nor what it is marketed for... And people don't think it's 
unprofessional because while it is non-standard, it has a mathematical 
beauty to it, which the current 0 doesn't.

As to including the "0" for making it easier to parse, with all of D's power 
and syntactic expressiveness, are we saying that the 0 is there just so we 
can use plain ol' strcmp to compare existing 2.068 against a potential 
future 2.100? Aw come on...

Finally, +1 for having the version numbers somehow reflect the stability and 
deprecation and stuff. semver is great, and meaningful. IIUC that system, we 
should make D something like:

2.x.y.z

where we only deprecate/break API when we change x, and do only bugfixes in 
z releases. Qt is an example of a great and *huge* and *successful* project 
which follows a very strict versioning system.

I seriously think making a sane versioning scheme will help adoption of D in 
the marketplace.

That said, we should probably already throw out the initial 2. too...

-- 
Shriramana Sharma, Penguin #395953