Alain LaBonté a écrit:
> So the discussion started with stability of "country" codes... If a
code
> represents a political territory, it can NOT be stable by nature,
whether
> it is alphabetic or numeric. The only stability you can expect has to do
> with the non-reassignment of a code within a reasonable period, to a
> different body.
To meta-paraphrase Albert Einstein (*), country codes should be as stable
as possible, and no more so.
It is true that country codes inherit a certain instability from the
nature of countries. There's not much we can do about that. However, it
is possible to limit the instability.
As I said earlier, to my knowledge Romania has not experienced any
inherent instability that would require the code to be changed. Neither
its boundaries, nor its political status, nor its form of government have
changed in any way. Instead, what happened is that somebody looked at the
alpha-3 code "ROM" (which was assigned DECADES ago and which is derived
from the first three letters of the country's name in its own language),
discovered that it spells out the name of an oppressed ethnic group within
that country, and panicked that they might be identified, by the use of
the country code "ROM," as belonging to the ethnic group "Rom."
This would be tantamount to assuming that all people from Benin, Guyana,
or Kenya are named Ben, Guy, or Ken, respectively.
The relevance of all of this to Unicode (besides the link to
internationalization) is that, unlike ISO 3166, Unicode has a policy that
forbids changing the name or position of a character once it has been
assigned. This policy frustrates some people, such as the North Koreans
and Cambodians, but in general it serves to assure users that following
today's standard will not result in invalid data next week.
(*) Albert Einstein is popularly (but probably incorrectly) quoted as
having said, "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not one bit
simpler."
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Feb 27 2002 - 12:06:44 EST