Re: LAO LETTER FO SUNG and LAO LETTER FO TAM

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Oct 22 2005 - 22:26:35 CST

  • Next message: Richard Wordingham: "Re: LAO LETTER FO SUNG and LAO LETTER FO TAM"

    From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
    > The Lao naming problems look like a type of typographical error, and
    > definitely not problems due to using a Thai expert when a Lao expert was
    > required.

    A typographical error that swaps the names of two letters is definitely not
    a typographical error if an expert was involved when validating the charts:
    only two page to read, can it be that difficult to see for an expert?

    May be experts were present during the encoding process, but not when the
    final decision was made on the codepoint allocations, and not before the
    document to publish in ISO/IEC 10646 was published. Then Unicode has
    inherited from this decision.

    Even if experts are involved I think that any new revision of Unicode of
    ISO/IEC 10646 should go through a validation process that will ask experts
    for final review of the documents, to check that no such error can occur,
    and allow rapid correction of possible errors. The allocation map in Thai
    and Lao is a complex grid with many holes that may finally contain such
    errors, and it's obvious that such composition errors can appear, and
    pathetic when this leads to an incoherent standard thart can't be changed
    later due to stability.

    Anyway, I don't think that the stability of character names is really
    important. The stability of these normative names are only necessary for the
    standardization process itself, but not for applications (including Unicode)
    of the ISO/IEC 10646 standard, that simply use the final allocated
    codepoints for all other references.

    I have definitely stopped thinking that these normative names are useful in
    any reference or application as identifiers (and their use in Unicode
    regexps is just an unnecessary pollution, that does not make regexps more
    useful and more expressive, given that equivalent codepoints can be used
    instead). What remains is the role of these names as semantic hints, but
    when these hints give false information, then it's best to use another list
    of names, accurate for the language in which the names will be used (so yes
    i support now the idea of creating separate lists of localized character
    names, the existing names belonging to the technical "C" locale, and not
    being even useful for the "root" locale).



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