Alexander Belopolsky wrote: > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:23 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: > .. >> "Latin-1" is the official name and the one used internally by Python, > > In what sense is "Latin-1" the official name? The IANA charset > registry has the following listing > > > Name: ISO_8859-1:1987 [RFC1345,KXS2] > MIBenum: 4 > Source: ECMA registry > Alias: iso-ir-100 > Alias: ISO_8859-1 > Alias: ISO-8859-1 (preferred MIME name) > Alias: latin1 > Alias: l1 > Alias: IBM819 > Alias: CP819 > Alias: csISOLatin1 > > (See http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets)
Those are registered character set names, not necessarily standard names. Anyone can apply for new aliases to get added to that list. > "Latin-1" spelling does appear in various unicode.org documents, but > not in machine readable files as far as I can tell. "Latin-1" is short for "Latin Alphabet No. 1" and started out as ECMA-94 in 1985 and 1986: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-094.htm ISO then applied their numbering scheme for the character set standard ISO-8859 in 1987 where "Latin-1" became "ISO-8859-1". Note that this was before the Internet took off. I assume that since the HTML standard used the more popular name "Latin-1" for its definition of the default character set and also made use of the term throughout the spec, it became the de-facto standard name for that character set at the time. I only learned about the term "ISO-8859-1" when starting to dive into the Unicode world late in the 1990s. "Latin-1" is also sometimes written as "ISO Latin-1", e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537495(v=vs.85).aspx For much the same reasons, "ISO-10646" never really became popular, but "Unicode" eventually did. "ECMA-262" or "ISO/IEC 16262" just doesn't sound as good as "JavaScript" either :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Feb 23 2011) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try our new mxODBC.Connect Python Database Interface for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com