[chrismorgan]

As described it probably is, but using string comparison would make what is already fairly fragile (they must have the same number of components) even more fragile and sensitive to change (they must now always have dots and digits in the same place, and the failure mode is now completely invisible). More stuff to be aware of. In practice I find precious few actually fixed-width formats like this, and more than a few pieces of software have struggled to go from version 9 to 10 or 99 to 100 because of bad assumptions. Or even date formats, two digit year was fine until 2000 when you either wrapped around to zero again, or went up to 100 (and some date APIs have modelled years as the number of years since 1900 in this way).