Re: revision of ISO 3166

Markus Kuhn <Markus dot Kuhn at cl dot cam dot ac dot uk> wrote:

> Section 5.2:
>
>   "The alpha-2 code uses combinations, in upper case, of two letters
>   of the 26-character Roman alphabet (ignoring diacritic signs) from
>   the range AA to ZZ."
>
> What ISO/CD 3166-1 calls the "Roman alphabet" is referred to in ISO
> 10646 as the "Latin script". Looks like the terminology ought to be
> sorted out here between the country code and the coded character set
> committees.

What ISO 10646 calls the "Latin script" comprises more than a thousand
letters.  Perhaps the 26-letter thing that is being referred to here
should be called "the modern English alphabet."  That's what it is,
really.

> [Side rant: I've never seen any application of the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3
> code.

I thought it was used on passports, which brought about the request to
change Romania's alpha-3 code from ROM to ROU, because Romanian citizens
supposedly didn't want their passports to identify them as Rom.
Supposedly.

> The International Olympic Committee (IOC) maintains another
> alpha-3 country code, which differs substantially from ISO 3166-1 and
> uses in some cases the same 3-letter code (e.g., ANT) for another
> country [http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/codes/country.htm]. Since