On Sat, 5 Apr 2003, C Bobroff wrote: > If unicode is so scrupulously attentive to details of standardization, > why is the naming scheme so haphazard?
Because of very tight constraints set by ISO, and a requirement of ISO that the names stay the same forever, even if mistakes are found in them. Standards need to guarantee stabilities to some degree in order to be implemented, and character names looked one of the promising cases. > The names of the Arabic letters are based on their Arabic *colloquial* > names (yeh instead of ya, heh instead of ha). The naming system is here because of the need for backward compatibility. Actually, ISO defines two characters in two different standard character sets to be the same thing if their name is exactly the same. So, all the character names got inherited automatically from ISO 8859 series of standards. ISO 8859-6 (Arabic/Latin) used those names (I don't know why), so ISO 10646 and Unicode inherited them directly. > For example, "Arabic letter Farsi Yeh". And the use of "Farsi" hasn't > been fixed after all the learned debates?? Once again, the letter was named like that in some old ISO standard about "extended" Arabic letters, and the name stuck. ISO and Unicode Consortium both use "Persian" when they refer to the name of the language. "Farsi" is sometimes used in the parentheses, to tell those who don't know about the politics involved to know that these are the same thing. roozbeh _______________________________________________ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
