Well, it would make sense to people. We have Emacs 18, 19, 20 and 21. Everyone knows that it's in essence the same program but that something written for 21 won't work in 19 (most lilely) and quite possibly the other way around. Ditty with Perl 4 and Perl 5 - I don't know perl but afaik those have many incompatibilites.
Also, it's really not different from what we already have - Pike 0.5, 0.6, 7.0, 7.2, 7.4 - they are often very incompatible (especially backwards - try porting a modern Pike 7.4 program to Pike 0.5 or even 0.6).
Just because we are considered "stable" (which one can argue pike 0.5 and 0.6 were not I guess), doesn't mean we can't change.
/ David Hedbor
Previous text:
2003-01-06 23:39: Subject: Re: Inconsistency.
Yes, it's a good idea to call the new language "Pike 8". That'd avoid throwing out much of the branding investment in the name "Pike". We'd then have the two languages "Pike 7" and "Pike 8". The drawback is that the name "Pike" would become even more ambiguous.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS