Unique, culturally-neutral, character identifiers, and ISO/IEC 10646

[Alain LaBonté <alb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

À 13:05 2000-02-20 -0500, Yves Hudon a écrit:
> 2- I have another idea. In ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2, they adopted the use of a 
> unique unambiguous identifier for each character. As far as I understand 
> (please Alain to
> confirm), they are managing characters in a kind of a registry.

[Alain]  There are 3 things to consider:

-the universal character set (UCS), of which each character has a unique
 identifier and a unique name in a given language version of the
 International standard (the UCS corresponds to International Standard
 ISO/IEC 10646 and to industrial standard "Unicode")

-other standard character sets, whose characters are recognized as
 equivalent if their name in a given language version of the standard is
 the same as the one in the UCS -- their UCS identifier is unique,
 regardless of the language version (and new versions of old character
 set standards will reflect the UCS unique identifiers as well as
 new standards have already begun to practice this)

-private character sets, which can be registered in the ISO character
 set registry (according to ISO 2375)... These characters will also
 be recognized as equivalent to standard characters if their name, or
 better, their eventually documented UCS identifier matches a UCS
 target (private characters sometimes have different names even
 in languages identical to those used in character set standards and
 are nevertheless corresponding characters -- the UCS identifier becomes
 even more important than names in any given language in these cases.
 ISO/IEC 2375 is being revised to make sure that this matching be done
 at some point for the registry as well.

Alain LaBonté
Oslo

PS: The ISO/IEC 14651 International Ordering Standard also recognizes
    characters according to their UCS identifier, regardless of coding.
    This unique, culturally-neutral, identifier is really the actual
    anchor, the ultimate hinge, that links identical characters between
    them... from now on and in the future...