From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 07:05:53 EST
On 18/12/2003 02:51, Arcane Jill wrote:
> ...
> In fact, until Kenneth Whistler's email about American English - I
> actually thought the Unicode character names /were/ in American
> English, because they are certainly not in my native dialect (although
> I did know that most Americans don't say "full stop"). Rest assured,
> Kenneth, we in Britain do /not/ refer to slash as "solidus",
> underscore as "low line", backslash as "reverse solidus", paragraph
> sign as "pilcrow sign", and so on. I have no idea where these terms
> came from, but, take it from someone who lives here, they are not in
> common usage in Britain. (With the exceptions of "full stop" and
> "anticlockwise"). Curious -- I wonder where those "official" names
> came from?
They are not the names used by British programmers. But they are perhaps
the names which were used by British typesetters, and maybe American
ones too, in the old days of hot metal.
>
> I've never attached any importance to the "proper" names (and I'm also
> a programmer). In fact, I don't even see why a Unicode character /has/
> to have a "proper name" at all. ASCII characters never had them. And,
> hey - the official names for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (for
> example) tell me nothing more than the script and codepoint anyway. I
> tend to regard them as "comments".
>
Agreed. The names are useful for selecting a character from a drop-down
list. But they are only useful if they are accurate. I agree with Doug
that "As a programmer, I can't personally imagine designing a program
that relies on the Unicode names to identify characters uniquely". I
suspect that the issue is more that WG2 people who are not programmers
decided on behalf of programmers, but without asking them, that
stability of names would be a good thing. And maybe because they want to
make sure their work lasts 1000 years.
Well, I don't want to be offensive to WG2 again, so I invite WG2 members
to correct me on this and explain why stability of character names is
considered so important. Don't just say "we promised stability so we
must deliver", I want to know why the promise was made and to whom. If
the people to whom the promise was made don't actually want it, then
maybe WG2 can be released from its unwise commitment.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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