Am 25.09.2017 um 22:12 schrieb Kenneth:

> Well, I'm learning something new every day ;-) Thanks for the clarification (and
> I hope I understand it all.) For one thing, it seems that I've been erroneously
> assuming "3.7x" and "3.7.x" to mean the same thing. (I've always used those
> interchangably-- including "3.7xx"-- as a kind of lazy 'shorthand', in my own
> mind and here in the newsgroups, for the same meaning-- not realizing that they
> may have different meanings technically.)

In some sense, versions "3.7x" and "3.7.x" do indeed mean the same thing
- namely in that if "3.7x" is to be interpreted as /any/ version of
POV-Ray, it can only be interpreted as a (sloppy) shorthand for "3.7.x".
Otherwise it would have to be interpreted as
"Three-dot-SeventySomething", which does not exist (not yet at any rate,
and possibly never will, if only for technical reasons).

The origin of this imprecise notation is probably the syntax and
semantics of the `#version` statement and `version` variable, which
encode the version number as a floating point value, with the second
decimal place representing the third portion of the version number, e.g.
both `#version 3.7` and `#version 3.70` identifying v3.7.0, `#version
3.62` identifying v3.6.2, etc.

Another reason might be that POV-Ray's version numbering scheme has
never been officially codified until quite recently.

As for proliferation of that sloppy notation, it can be blamed on lots
of people, including members of the dev team. I guess even I myself did
use it on several occasions in the past.

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