[OT] Standards (was Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1)

On 25.02.2025 17:16, David Brown wrote:

[...]

 
The standard used by modems here is UCS2, not UTF-16.  As you point out,
this was all standardised in the early 1990's (before UTF-16) - as a
standardisation of things that had already been used before that.

And
once a telecom standard is made, it is set in stone and never changed.

This is (or should be) true for all _standards_; that's the point
about standards, to be a reliable base.[*]

In standards ("telecom standards" or else) there's also typically
evolutions with versioning and/or also obsoleting/deprecating older
versions or newer versions just superseding older ones, though.
So the property "never changed" should be read accordingly.

(Just saying, to not get a wrong impression about the "telecom
standards", CCITT, ITU-T,[**] specifically, and other standards.)

Janis

[*] The colloquial terminology is sometimes quite fuzzy though; e.g.
the *.doc format was often named "de facto standard", but there was
a long period of time neither a public document of that "standard"
nor was it a standard in the first place; the proprietary format
changed silently while the extension (and folks calling the format
a "standard") stayed.

[**] As a drastic example of evolution consider X.509 for example;
initially it was only (compared to later versions) a "handful" of
pages (something like 25 vs. 250, IIRC).

[...]