[Python-Dev] Strange error importing a Pickle from 2.7 to 3.2

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:23 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> ..
>> "Latin-1" is the official name and the one used internally by Python,
> 
> In what sense is "Latin-1" the official name?  The IANA charset
> registry has the following listing
> 
> 
> Name: ISO_8859-1:1987                                    [RFC1345,KXS2]
> MIBenum: 4
> Source: ECMA registry
> Alias: iso-ir-100
> Alias: ISO_8859-1
> Alias: ISO-8859-1 (preferred MIME name)
> Alias: latin1
> Alias: l1
> Alias: IBM819
> Alias: CP819
> Alias: csISOLatin1
> 
> (See http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets)

Those are registered character set names, not necessarily
standard names. Anyone can apply for new aliases to get
added to that list.

> "Latin-1" spelling does appear in various unicode.org documents, but
> not in machine readable files as far as I can tell.

"Latin-1" is short for "Latin Alphabet No. 1" and
started out as ECMA-94 in 1985 and 1986:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-094.htm

ISO then applied their numbering scheme for the character set
standard ISO-8859 in 1987 where "Latin-1" became "ISO-8859-1".
Note that this was before the Internet took off.

I assume that since the HTML standard used the more popular
name "Latin-1" for its definition of the default character set
and also made use of the term throughout the spec, it
became the de-facto standard name for that character set
at the time. I only learned about the term "ISO-8859-1"
when starting to dive into the Unicode world late in the
1990s.

"Latin-1" is also sometimes written as "ISO Latin-1", e.g.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537495(v=vs.85).aspx

For much the same reasons, "ISO-10646" never really became
popular, but "Unicode" eventually did.

"ECMA-262" or "ISO/IEC 16262" just doesn't sound as good as
"JavaScript" either :-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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