I've always wondered if windows 3.11 was not meant as a minor upgrade of 3.1, but they assumed versions are a float so 3.1.1 was out of the question. There is AFAIK no windows 3.2 to windows 3.10

One reason I think adding the third component is useful. At least 1.10.0 is clear you aren't looking at an ordinary decimal point number.

There are also plenty of humans (and software) that will change x.y.z to x.yz

There are plenty of countries outside the US that don't use '.' as a date separator.

Even in the US format, the 10th of January is still after the 9th of January.

Perhaps the correct sentiment would be "If you're not used to reading, you'd be surprised that 1.10 comes after 1.9 and vice versa".

I have no idea how you or your parent immediately arrived at calendar dates (which in my book require a period at the end), but to everyone i know, 1.10 is not a date, but a floating point number with the same magnitude as 1.1, which is thus closer to 0 than 1.9 is.

What locale is that? I know that e.g. de-DE uses trailing dot to mark ordinal numbers, so "1." means "the first", but it also uses decimal comma instead of decimal point, so there is no confusion.

TBH, I'm German, but a Software Engineer, so it's a mix of both.

I don't know what an average German would make of "1.10", really. I've only seen that as "subsection 10 of section 1 of a book".

How would October 1st be written down at your place?

1.10.

Ah i see, the trailing dot.