Re: Stability of WG2

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Dec 17 2003 - 11:09:51 EST

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Case mapping of dotless lowercase letters"

    Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:

    >> Nobody would call chimps Homo troglodytes, or orangs Simia satyrus,
    >> today, but those names can't ever be assigned to other species in
    >> future. (If chimps were folded into Homo, they would be H.
    >> troglodytes again.)
    >
    > And that is more or less what I would like to see with Unicode
    > character names. Old names can remain valid as deprecated synonyms (or
    > perhaps non-deprecated synonyms e.g. if "Corean" becomes officially
    > preferred but "Korean" is still in widespread use), and not reusable
    > for other characters, but should be gradually replaceable by new,
    > correct or updated names.

    I really think this is a deceased Equus caballus.

    As a programmer, I can't personally imagine designing a program that
    relies on the Unicode names to identify characters uniquely, instead of
    relying on the code points. Of course the names have to be unique, but
    beyond that it certainly wouldn't bother me or any of the programs I've
    written if some of the names were changed from one version to the next.

    But apparently, for whatever reason, it IS very important to some
    programmers and programs, and they have made it very clear for years and
    years now that the names *must not change* in the interest of stability.
    That is the policy of UTC and WG2, and it will not be changed simply
    because anyone -- an individual or an entire committee -- determines
    that name A' (or B) is more appropriate for a character than name A.
    That goes for glaring mistakes like OI and HANGZHOU, and for typos like
    FHTORA, and it would go for KOREAN as well.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Dec 17 2003 - 12:05:58 EST