At 23:30 15-05-2012, Mark Davis â wrote:
I firmly agree. Stability is far more important than fiddling with the identifier names.
Yes.
After all, the identifier names are really not for human consumption; they need translation for anything but English, and even for English need some tweaking. And if people want to have different groupings, that is easy to do. In CLDR, for example, we group according to the United Nations M.49 standard for continents and subcontinents. (Cf http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/territory_containm...)
Some of the countries listed in Eastern Africa under M.49 are actually in another sub-continent in terms of political sub-continents. Greenland is part of North America and politically within Europe. Cyprus is categorized under Asia. If a rule of the thumb was needed, it could be to pick the continent where people in the region think they are. It avoids the "how many continents are there" question. Regards, -sm