NAME

Locale::Changes - details important changes after 2.07

3.00

New maintainer

From 1997 to 2004, Locale::Codes was maintained by Neil Bowers. Unfortunately, no updates were made from June 2004 to January 2010. During that time, a number of changes have been made to the standards since then, so the data included was out-of-date.

I contacted Neil to get his permission to assume maintenance of the module, and he kindly agreed.

All codes are generated from standards

All of the values returned by the various functions are now values directly from the standards. This means that the values returned in the 2.xx series are not necessarily the same as the values returned here.

As an example, the ISO 3166 standard which lists country codes refers to the country associated with the code "bo" as "Bolivia, Plurinational State of", so that is what is returned. In the 2.xx series, "Bolivia" was returned. Also, the country names vary from one standard to another. So the code "bol" which is maintained by the United Nations returns the name of the country as "Bolivia (Plurinational State of)". Some common aliases have been added, so you can still request a code associated with a county name "Bolivia".

Since the data comes from the standards, some "incorrect" values are no longer supported. For example, 2.07 treated "Zaire" as an alias for "Congo", but the country changed it's name, and "Zaire" is not in the standard, so it has been dropped in 3.00.

Added several code sets from standards

I've added the following code sets:

FIPS 10 country codes
Alpha-3 and Term language codes
Numeric currency codes

Locale::Script changed

In 2.xx, Locale::Script assigned scripts to country codes, which is NOT how it is done currently in the standards. It appears that an older version of ISO 15924 did this, but I haven't found an old version to confirm that, and in any case, that is not the case in the current standards.

As a result, the Locale::Script module is completely incompatible with the 2.xx version with respect to the types of codes it supports. None of the old codes will work.

Added missing functions

I've added in some functions which were "missing" previously (since there was only one set of codes supported, the code2code functions didn't apply):

language_code2code
currency_code2code

so the interfaces for each type of codes are consistent.

Dropped support for _alias_code

In Locale::Country, _alias_code was an allowed, but deprecated function which was documented to be supported in the 2.xx series. I've removed it.

SEE ALSO

Locale::Codes

AUTHOR

See Locale::Codes for full author history.

Currently maintained by Sullivan Beck (sbeck@cpan.org).

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2010-2010 Sullivan Beck

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.