Well put, Jon. The role of a more complete human-readable (yet still
short) description is handled by the totality of a character's entry in
the code charts. For some characters, this includes up to a dozen lines
of notes and other information. In many cases, this information is
enough to let you pinpoint the character, that is relate it to its real
use in text, no matter the context. Where that is insufficient, the full
description includes the properties for the character from the UCD and
the discussion in the relevant chapter of the standard.
The notes and discussions in the text can be amended any time to fix any
shortcomings, the same is true for most of the UCD properties for the
character.
A./
On 11/29/2011 1:55 AM, Jon Hanna wrote:
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.
