The Shape of Code

Governments actively promote Standards because following them saves their citizens time and money. The UK and US have contrasting rationales, with the UK focusing on savings achieved through repeated use of standardized items and the US focusing on the repeated use of skills people acquired through using a standardized item (i.e., reduced training costs).

Manufacturers wanting to export products want to be able to ship identical products all over the world, i.e., not have to make costly changes for different national markets. To be able to do this, they need the rest of the world to have a Standard way of doing things. The once dominant military and industrial status of Great Britain, and now the US, motivated them to create and encourage other countries to follow the Standards they created.

These days, most programming language Standards work is done by people employed by US companies attending an international committee, SC22, with (currently) 28 countries paying to be P (participating) members and 21 countries as O (observing) members (most countries don’t appear to have any active involvement in language standards). The reason for the dominance of US companies is that few non-US companies are willing to fund staff to do Standard’s work. For a few languages SC22 essentially rubber stamps documents produced elsewhere, e.g., most of the Cobol work used to be done by a US committee and ECMAScript (aka JavaScript) work is done in a European committee mostly attended by US companies.

Other countries sometimes get to dominate the creation of a language Standard, e.g., the UK led the Pascal Standard work. At the last SC22 meeting, a person from the US lamented that Europe was set to become the dominant driver of the Ada Standard. I resisted the urge to cheer: Make Europe Great Again.

Getting an international Standard adopted throughout the world requires that ISO be politically neutral and accept any sovereign country as a member (provided they pay the membership fees). For instance, North Korea is a member of ISO.

The only politics I have previously seen in programming language standard meetings has involved company rivalry, not geopolitical rivalry. A recent request for comment from SC2 (the ISO committee responsible for coded character sets; readers are more likely to be familiar with Unicode, essentially the same information published by a non-profit consortium based in California) looks like geopolitics, in the sense of geopolitical virtue signalling.

The document is: Request for SC2 member comments on proposal to encode “Ruble sign with double vertical stem”. What does the character “Ruble sign with double vertical stem” look like? To quote the document: “The proposed character is a text element that cannot be represented by any existing character or character sequence.” Readers will have to imagine Russia’s Ruble currency symbol, ₽, with two vertical stems (I assume these stems are short antennae like lines).

What is the geopolitical connection? Readers will be aware of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but may not be aware of Russia’s involvement in Transnistria (quoting Wikipedia, “… a landlocked breakaway state internationally recognized as part of Moldova.”). Since 1994, the proposed character has been used as the Transnistria currency symbol.

The request for comment includes a “Non-technical considerations” section summarises various controversy points, and finishes with: “We are not aware of any non-technical criteria having been used by SC2 or WG2 in the past that could be applied to disqualify this character. We are also concerned that adopting a criterion that allows for opposing a character because of association with politically or socially defined user communities could be problematic.”

The proposed character is not included in ISO 4217 (which defines numeric codes for the representation of currencies). However, SC22 does not require that a character used to represent a currency be included in ISO 4217. Previously, SC22 has accepted currency characters that are not in ISO 4217.

Is this a one-off objection, or does it mark the start of a stream of requests to remove one or more politically incorrect characters from ISO 10646/Unicode?

A lot of people put a lot of effort into creating a unified Standard for all the characters created by the World’s people. I hope the destructive nature of virtue signalling does not take hold in programming language Standard ecosystem.