change the version variable of a plugin to a string

Is there any particular reason that the version of a plugin is limited to a number? I would like it to be a string so that I can use svn keywords and automatically change the version whenever I commit a change.

Thanks,
Bast

I'd appreciate this too. I want to use semantic versioning for my plugins (semver.org, format major.minor.bugfix), i.e. 5.1.0, but I can't use more than one dot in the version string, so I have to do something like "5.100".

It was intended to let you do a numeric compare to see if plugin A needed plugin B of a certain version or more.

Changing to a string makes numeric compares not work, and string compares work differently.

You can always imbed the svn version number into the description, for instance.