From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sun Oct 23 2005 - 04:55:08 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> 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.
What if header files for an application are automatically generated from
UnicodeData.txt? (I for one am on the verge of using such a header file.)
Now, for most applications, swapping LAO LETTER FO SUNG and LAO LETTER FO
TAM will not matter. But suppose I have a program that converts written Lao
to IPA. (There is at least one web application that does this, but I
haven't tried looking at its code. It'd be trivial compared to the programs
that struggle to extract the pronunciation from written Thai. ) If such an
application is using automatically generated identifiers, swapping them
round will break it if it is already working properly, and fix it if the
author had been too clever and trusted the Unicode names to give him the
consonant classes.
> 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).
Congratulations on memorising the Unicode codepoint assessments. I though I
was doing well to recognise the virama codepoints by number.
Richard.
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