ISO 3166 (country codes) Maintenance Agency Web pages move

[Mark Davis]

Of course, any change causes problems. However, they can minimize the
problems if -- at a minimum -- they adopt a permanent, public policy
that:

  a) Once established, a country code will never be reused to
designate a different country.
  b) If a country code is changed, the old code will remain as an
alias, permanently.

That way, even if they continue the policy of changing names at whim,
without regard for the consequences of their actions and the worldwide
dependencies on stable country codes, at least old data is never
invalidated.

Mark

(The same goes for language codes, of course.)
—————

Γνῶθι σαυτόν — Θαλῆς
[For transliteration, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/tr]

http://www.macchiato.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
To: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>; <ietf-languages@iana.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2002 11:21
Subject: Re: ISO 3166 (country codes) Maintenance Agency Web pages
move


> Michael Everson scripsit:
> >  From the 3166 MA:
> > =====
> > New alpha-3 code element for Romania
> >
> > At the request of the Romanian Government the ISO 3166/MA decided
to
> > change the ISO 3166-1 three-letter (alpha-3) code element for
Romania
> > from ROM to ROU.
> >
> > The change took effect on 1 February 2002.
> > =====
>
> As I understand it, this request is more of a command.  The only
> fully stable codes in 3166 are the numeric ones.
>
> --
> John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
cowan@ccil.org
> To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.
There
> are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the
language
> that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was
wonderful.
>         --_The Hobbit_
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