Comparing Raw Values of the Age Property

Given two raw values of the Age property, defined in UCD file
DerivedAge.txt, how is a computer program supposed to compare them?
Apart from special handling for the value "Unassigned" and its short
alias "NA", one used to be able to compare short values against short
values and long values against long values by simple string
comparison. However, now we are coming to Version 10.0 of Unicode,
this no longer works - "1.1" < "10.0" < "2.0".

There are some possibilities - the values appear in order in
PropertyValueAliases.txt and in DerivedAge.txt. However, I can find no
relevant guarantees in UAX#44. I am looking for a solution that can be
driven by the data files, rather than requiring human thought at every
version release. Can one rely on the FULL STOP being the field
divider, and can one rely on there never being any grouping characters
in the short values? Again, I could find no guarantees.

Richard.
Received on Mon May 22 2017 - 16:44:41 CDT