Re: Standard Library Interest?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> Ah well, I'm beginning to see the difficulties, thanks. The Babel
> effect won't be stopped by Unicode ;-)

What Unicode and ISO 10646 have finally managed to do is associate 
standard names with characters.  As you point out, there are cases where 
there are many identical glyphs with different names, such as LATIN 
CAPITAL LETTER A, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER A, and CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A. 
  But at least now the Babel effect is well documented.  Although there 
was a lot of resistance to the standard initially for political reasons.

As far as I know, the fall of the Soviet Union has ended the problem the 
Russians had with including some Georgian letters, and the various wars 
and so on in former Yugoslavia may have ended concerns about some 
Macedonian characters on the part of the Greeks.  And then there is 
Quebec.  To you and I, the concept of going to war over characters in an 
  alphabet may seem strange, but there were a couple of times when it 
almost came to that.  In fact, the Greeks refused to recognize the 
Republic of Macedonia unless they changed the way the country's name was 
written in English!

I kid you not, the Macadonian and Greek versions of the name were fine, 
but the Greeks wanted to get the Americans, British and so on to use a 
different name for the country.  I think the political compromise was 
for the UN to refer to Macedonia as "the former Yugoslav Republic of 
Macedonia" in English.  I have no idea of what the French, Spanish, 
Russian, Arabic and Chinese versions are like.  Hmmm.  The United 
Nations site gives:
English: Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; FYR of Macedonia
French:  ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine
Spanish: ex República Yugoslava de Macedonia
Russian: бывшая югославская Республика Македония
Arabic:  جمهورية مقدونيا اليوغوسلافية السابقة
Chinese: 前南斯拉夫的马其顿共和国

The European Union site: http://europa.eu.int/eurodicautom/Controller gives:
English:      Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
German:       Ehemalige jugoslawische Republik Mazedonien
French:       Ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine
Italian:      Ex Repubblica jugoslava di Macedonia
all referencing ISO 3166-1:1997

So it seems pretty consistant.
-- 
                                                     Robert I. Eachus

"Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the 
goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, 
down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or 
down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along...the repair 
of an old motorcycle."  -- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance by Robert Pirsig