Good point. Remember that the predicted life of Unicode (recently predicted by Michael, anyway) is longer than the lifetime of the current WG2 members
My point is that the work we do identifying characters and encoding them won't have to be done again. Once Manichaean is encoded, it's encoded.
One day, 200 years from now, there may be some Puricode revision which will do away with some of the duplicate encodings which we have for various legacy and round-trip "requirements". But that will not invalidate our work today.
Even if this is a millennial reign of peace and prosperity, processes of language change will not stop. A list of character names from 1000 years ago, even from 400 years ago, would look very strange today.
Nothing stops you from publishing a list of character names in proper English, in Portuguese, or on some Inglish which may exist a long time from now. Currently those strings are "required" to be changeless for stability. So we do not change them, as long as that requirement remains, which the vendors say it is.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
