[tei-council] Guidelines: "code point" vs. "codepoint" vs. "code-point"

[Dan O'Donnell]

There's a discussion of this very issue here:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2003Oct/0147.html

Unfortunately they hate code-point which would have been my solution if
we don't want to go with #2.

Why not #1 codepoint everywhere then? It shows up all the time, albeit
mostly in titles, code, and filenames; it allows us to be consistent
quickly; and we can always return to the issue if we get hatemail (or
should that be hate mail)

-dan


On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 12:39 -0500, David Sewell wrote:
> All,
> 
> I've been doing some cleanup for consistency of usages in the
> Guidelines. Almost all of the decisions are straightforward and
> noncontroversial, but there's one that needs input from everyone: the
> spelling to use for "code point" in the sense of a value in a character
> set.
> 
> There are three possible choices:
> 
> 	1. codepoint (noun and adjective)
> 	2. code point (n.) but code-point (adj.)
> 	   [contrast "a code point" vs. "a code-point value"]
> 	3. code-point (n. and adj.)
> 
> The Guidelines are wildly inconsistent. Chapter 5, "Representation of
> Non-standard Characters and Glyphs", uses "codepoint" throughout.
> In the other chapter where the term occurs a lot, chapter vi "Languages
> and Character Sets", "code point" appears 11 times and "code-point" 45
> times (mostly as a noun), but no "codepoint".
> 
> "Code point" for the noun form seems prevalent in technical usage. That
> is the form given in the Unicode Consortium's online glossary
> (http://unicode.org/glossary/#C). One problem with treating it as two
> words, though, is that the English convention of hyphenating compounds
> in adjectival use ("a code-point value") is not always easy to follow,
> i.e. some uses are ambiguous between noun and adjective function.
> 
> Does anyone have strong feelings one way or another about this? If the
> Guidelines were a static document I'd lean toward #2, but it's easier to
> maintain documentation if you don't have to apply grammatical criteria.
> >From that point of view "codepoint" is the simplest solution.
> 
> I'd like to commit my changes before Sebastian's deadline of 1 Feb, but
> I won't touch codepoint/code-point/code point without some feedback.
> 
> David
> 
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/