ZinZam

Infinity and Version Numbers

March 18, 2006

Infinity has some interesting properties, one of those is it's use in version numbers.

The most interesting use in a version number would have to be the 2nd digit in the phpBB Version (Linux based) system. If you don't know, the 2nd digit is odd for development versions, and even for stable versions. The interesting things happen with the development version numbers.

It seems that no-one knows how to represent a number before 3.0.0 without it being a 2.0 version. The closest estimate I could conjure is 2.?.0.

This has some important properties. It's still a 2.0 version, therefore it's impossible to reach by the property ? + 1 = ?, (which also means whoever says infinity first wins, and the person who says infinity + 1 is a sore loser, but that's not important). The reason it's interesting comes from this property, which according to DavidMJ also means it's even and odd at the same time! This has an important consequence, it means it's both stable, and in development at the same time. Because this number is impossible to reach, it means it's impossible for software to be stable and in development at the same time (take that clueless Beta testers).

There is another property, if you want to install a version infinity versions old when you are using version ?, this means mathematically ? - ? which is again equal to ?. Which means once you use an infinite version of a software, there is no way to downgrade, nor would it be possible to upgrade.

So as version numbers are period separated numbers, its probably a good thing their not like decimal numbers where you have to overflow the maximum value that can be taken in order to increment the number to the left of the period. Otherwise as version numbers are unbounded, we might have to wait forever for phpBB3.0.0 to be released, but I suppose that notion varies depending on who you talk to.

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