[X4U] Update Numbering

[Doug McNutt]

At 09:04 -0700 6/22/07, keith_w wrote:
>Richard Gilmore wrote:
>>But mathematically 10.4.1 and 10.4.10 are the same amount.

There is actually a lot to all of the dotted decimal stuff that's strange.

Start with your international settings which can make dots into commas.

"Natural order" sorting of file names as used by Finder does tricks with numbers that make xxx.10.txt appear after xxx.9.txt when simple ASCII sorting would do otherwise. It can be a pain if you also use the ls command and expect a match of orders.  But what about "1.1" and "1.01"?  What about "1 2/3" vs "5/3"?  "1.3E-27"?

Does everyone know that, as IP addresses, 100.100.100.010 is not the same as 100.100.100.10?
 It turns out that the 010 is interpreted as octal in good old C conventions so the first IP gets read as 100.100.100.8 by internet software. IP v6 will use hexadecimal numbers as a default.

Just don't trust "numbers" with multiple decimal points unless you really study what's the programmers have in mind.

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