From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Aug 23 2005 - 00:50:48 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>> You cannot be serious:
>> * ISO 3166-2 code elements are not necessarily alpha-3. Among many
>> other countries, France and the U.S. do not use alpha-3 code
>> elements.
>
> I cannot resist to reply your (quite irrespective) remark!
>
> Sorry, this was an evident minor (1-char) typo here. Of course I meant
> ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. I know that ISO 3166-2 refers to subdivisions of
> countries (as I also said in the rest of the message, where I wanted
> to criticize the way it is currently built).
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 code elements are almost identical in
their stability (or lack thereof). I can find no instances in the
31-year history of ISO 3166 where an alpha-3 code element was changed
while the corresponding alpha-2 code was left unchanged. (If you can
find one, please accept my apologies.)
I can, however, find at least one instance where the reverse was true:
in 2002 the alpha-3 code element for Romania was changed from ROM to
ROU, while the alpha-2 code element RO was unchanged. In private
correspondence, the then-Secretariat said that a similar change to the
alpha-2 code element "would probably have been out of the question," in
part "because the two-letter code is being used much more extensively
than the three letter code." In other words, the stability standards
for alpha-2 are higher than for alpha-3.
(Sorry I haven't read the remainder of your post yet. I will get to
it.)
>er than for alpha-3.
(Sorry I haven't read the remainder of your post yet. I will get to
> And alpha-3 codes have their use also in France and US (where did you
The context was ISO 3166-2, or so I thought. Code elements within ISO
> What I wanted to show is that, for countries and territories in ISO
See above regarding alpha-2 versus alpha-3.
The numeric code elements (henceforth "codes"), which are really UN
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: Tue Aug 23 2005 - 00:52:03 CDT
it.)
> read that they don't use them?) in many applications (less than alpha-
> 2 codes, but the "do not use" expression is wrong).
3166-2 for France and the U.S. are two characters long. Obviously if
your comment about ISO 3166-2 was a typo, then this response does not
apply.
> 3166-1, alpha-3 codes and numeric codes are more reliable than alpha-2
> commonly used to build locale identifiers.
codes rather than ISO codes, are usually considered more stable, but it
depends on what kind of stability you are looking for. ISO alpha codes
change when the name of a country changes (or whenever the country feels
like changing it; see Romania). UN numeric codes change when the
territory covered by the code changes. Normally the latter event is
less frequent than the former, but the reverse can also happen; in 1993,
the numeric code for Ethiopia changed from 230 to 231 (because of the
loss of territory to Eritrea) while the alpha codes remained ET and ETH.
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/