I have been looking for a term to deal with a seemingly common pattern where a string consists of numbers separated by a . to n levels deep.
A prime example is Semantic Versioning numbers which are comprised of three numbers wherein 1.0.0 > 0.1.0.
A project I am working on uses this pattern for identifiers for an n-level deep tree structure, such that 1 < 1.1 < 1.1.1 etc.
Is there a name for these strings? They aren’t decimals, and the names “dot separated numbers” or “dot separated values” get me nowhere because of the dot separated values spec for spreadsheets.
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The general term you are looking for is hierarchical numbering system/scheme:
- Hierarchical numbering consist of assigning a sequence of separated numbers (one number per level traversed) to identify uniquely an element in the tree.
- The most common hierarchical numbering system is the decimal one.
This kind of numbering scheme (i.e. data type) is rather general: it can be used to identify headings and paragraphs in documents, but it can also identify a position in an org-chart, an XML node in an XML tree, or a WBS element in a work breakdown structure.