On 2011-11-23 10:38, Jeremie Hornus wrote:
I was thinking the ID being the code point value itself, and the "name" a human readable description of it.
They are both IDs. One is from the range of numbers from 0 to 1114111 (10FFFF base 16), the other is from the range of strings of characters each in the range {U+0020, U+002D, U+0030-U+0039, U+0041-U+0056} with rules for equality matching that lets us compare with mixed-case forms.
In both cases we have a value which can be compared for equality with another value, which refers to at most one entity, and which offers a reasonable guarantee of immutability (due to the stability on names that started this thread). They're both IDs.
On the other hand, the name is not always very good as a human readable description. It's unpleasant in this context at the best of times (UPPER CASE TENDS TO TIRE THE EYES VERY QUICKLY), it's often considered incorrect, and it very often when accurate is still incomplete as to the different uses made of the character in different contexts, all of which makes it occasionally poor as a human readable description (pretty much every time people have wanted to have a name changed, at least one person thought it failed in this regard).
The human-readability is a convenience for those using the identifiers, but it's more akin to the human-readability of programming and markup languages than the human-readability of a well-written reference book.
