Re: Old-style PropList.txt "properties"

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jun 17 2009 - 20:19:14 CDT

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    Karl Williamson inquired:

    > Supposedly Unicode has only removed one property, but I've been looking
    > at old releases, and see several things that look like they are meant to
    > be properties that I don't recognize in the PropList.txt like
    > 'Zero-Width'. Others look like aliases for other properties, like
    > 'Space' appears to be Zs. Others look like combinations of two
    > properties, like 'Paired Punctuation'.

    You are looking at very old versions of PropList.txt,
    when it truly was an entirely informative data file, with
    no normative implications, and before the UTC restructured
    it and started keeping track of exactly what did and did
    not constitute formal character properties in data files
    other than UnicodeData.txt.

    PropList-3.1.0.txt is the first version that had official
    status, used the current format (more or less), and which had
    formal property aliases that can be traced consistently
    through to current versions of the standard.

    Versions of PropList.txt associated with Unicode 3.0.1 and
    earlier (back to Unicode 2.0, the earliest version with
    any data files) were simply dumps of a character property
    implementation that I personally maintained, and which I
    offered as informative material in case other people wanted
    to look at it. None of the values in that file had any
    formal property status at the time.

    > So my question is were any of these official properties or official
    > aliases thereof, or were they just descriptive phrases.

    Just descriptive phrases.

    > I've looked
    > some but not a lot in the 3.0 online guide, and haven't found anything;
    > the index is not very helpful.

    There was no formal documentation of any of that. The
    formal property lists and their full documentation came later.
    For Version 3.0, UnicodeCharacterDatabase.html basically
    says the file PropList.txt exists and has additional informative
    properties.

    --Ken



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