No subject

backwards compatibility, where there is a high level of similarity
between forms -- even more so when we are talking about current
standards.

If I wrote a search today that identifies all Academy-standard
Belarusian text in a database or library, I'd want it to work tomorrow
and next year, and the year after that. However, a search on be-1959acad
would cease to bring up new text as soon as be-2008acad became the
official norm. These dated tags are transient, and there is no permanent
umbrella tag that a librarian, systems developer or member of the public
can use to tie the variants together.

A library may set up separate sections for classical and academy texts,
but we would expect 2008 standard academy texts to be shelved alongside
books written in the current standard.  As such, we want an identifiable
common element, so the librarian can say to a trainee "all be-academy go
here, all be-tarask go here".  This is vastly preferable to the
alternative of "all be go here, unless they are be-tarask" -- what if
someone was to introduce be-arabic?  We wouldn't want to shelve that
alongside the cyrillic texts, but our official procedures would say to
do so.

In a normal library human common sense may prevail in this case, but in
automated systems that option isn't available.


I favour adding "academy" now, and later (if deemed necessary) "-1959"
and "-2008" as further variants.

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