Re: String name and Character Name

From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 22 2005 - 13:41:10 CST

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    John H. Jenkins wrote at 12:15 PM on Friday, April 22, 2005:

    >Personally, I tend to think that the best long-term solutions involve
    >Unicode emphasizing that these are really semi-arbitrary character
    >identifiers and not names per se -- perhaps, if that's possible,
    >taking to referring to them as character identifiers and not
    >character names -- and having an official or semi-official list of
    >localized names for actual use in UIs and which are explicitly
    >guaranteed *not* to be stable.

    Sounds good to me.

    By the way, "... emphasizing that these are really semi-arbitrary character
    identifiers and not names per se" sounds awfully close to "deprecation"
    as names.

    >But this doesn't solve the whole problem. We're still left with some
    >issues, either stemming from politics (e.g., do you call them
    >"Burmese" letters or not?), or stemming from Becker's Law where two
    >experts dispute a character's *real* name, history, or function.

    But you have this same problem of disputes over character names whether
    the names are changeable or not - it's just that mutability gives you
    ways out of the mess.

      
    >That's an irreducible minimum for which the only real solution is a
    >proliferation of synonyms.

    1) I see a standardized "proliferation of synonyms" as a desirable thing
    - there is no way I'm going to refer to the cuneiform sign SHEDUR as
    CUNEIFORM SIGN LAGAB TIMES TE PLUS A PLUS SU PLUS NA, the "name" U+121E6
    will have in the standards.

    2) If changeable character names are not standardized the "proliferation
    of synonyms" will be even greater.

    Respectfully,

    Dean A. Snyder

    Assistant Research Scholar
    Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
    Computer Science Department
    Whiting School of Engineering
    218C New Engineering Building
    3400 North Charles Street
    Johns Hopkins University
    Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

    office: 410 516-6850
    cell: 717 817-4897
    www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
    http://users.adelphia.net/~deansnyder/



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