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_containment_un_m_49.html)

And for programmers, grep or equivalent is fine.

— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:26 AM, Kevin Kenny <kkenny2@nycap.rr.com> wrote:

On 05/15/2012 07:56 AM, Kevin Lyda wrote:

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:36 PM, David Patte<dpatte@relativedata.com> wrote:

No, America is not a continent. It is two continents. North America, and

This is debatable.

http://blog.cgpgrey.com/what-are-continents/

In the end it's all subjective. And since it's subjective and it's
annoying to make these changes, it's a valid position to say that the
current configuration is subjectively fine.

And it's also politically charged. There are several countries
that are located in a part of the globe traditionally identified as
Asia that have petitioned at various times to join the EU; I recall
at least one proposal to change such a country to a 'Europe/' identifier
from an 'Asia/' one.

And the 'North_America/South_America' line is equally thorny. Central
American countries face vehement arguments over whether they belong
to North America (by geographical affiliation - placing the dividing
line at the narrowest part of the Isthmus of Panama) or to South America
(by language and culture).

There are no good answers. Stability argues that the best answer is
to say, "the names are what they have been, right or wrong, until and
unless an overwhelming consensus emerges to change them."
It means that we wind up stuck with some past mistakes. It also means
that we don't have to track the political winds that whirl about
continually and return according to their circuits.