From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 05:53:21 EST
On 15/12/2003 16:57, Doug Ewell wrote:
> ...
>
>I'm not saying Peter is right, that this WILL happen, just trying to
>articulate his point that the possibility in the future is greater than
>nil.
>
>
I didn't say that it WILL happen either, just that it might happen (and,
later, that some changes might be desirable).
>...
>
>It seems clear that the current "enlightened" WG2 membership is
>committed to both the letter and spirit of the current stability policy
>(to the dismay of Peter, who would like to see certain changes in names,
>combining classes, etc.). But there is really no way we can predict
>whether the eventual successors to Ken, Michael, Rick, Michel, etc. will
>share the same commitment. Remember that most of us once believed in
>the stability of ISO 3166 as well.
>
>
>
Good point. Remember that the predicted life of Unicode (recently
predicted by Michael, anyway) is longer than the lifetime of the current
WG2 members, longer even than the US Constitution (so far), the figure
of 1000 years was mentioned. Even if this is a millennial reign of peace
and prosperity, processes of language change will not stop. A list of
character names from 1000 years ago, even from 400 years ago, would look
very strange today. Surely long before then the members of the successor
body to WG2 will realise that the Unicode 4.0 list of character names,
and probably also a lot of other things in Unicode which are now
considered stable, require major updates.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Dec 16 2003 - 06:36:15 EST