Will a version range for a parent pom reference work?

We are wondering whether we can use a version range for the "parent"->"vers=
ion" property in our pom.xml. The docs don't explicitly say so, but compari=
ng the info for the "version" property in "parent" vs. "dependency", we see=
 that only in "dependency" does it mention the possibility of using the ran=
ge syntax.  In our tests, it didn't reject the range syntax in the parent, =
but we'd have to set up a more complex test to verify whether it's actually=
 respecting it.  We're currently on version 3.9.8.