Growing major version

Posted Feb 14, 2026 0:51 UTC (Sat) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: Growing major version by alx.manpages
Parent article: The first half of the 7.0 merge window

I suspect the main reason that works for C is that there's only one significant release per decade, so most people only need to remember the first digit and don't care about the placeholder. Probably won't scale well to something with a release every two months.

(I think it's pretty confusing even for C++ with three releases per decade, where C++0x = C++11, C++1y = C++14, C++1z = C++17. Apparently they've now committed to a strict 3-year release cycle so the dates are predictable and shouldn't need placeholders, but GCC/Clang still refer to C++2a and C++2c anyway.)