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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.
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.
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".
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
