Ray:

> At the State Department
> website (www.state.gov) we use the digraphs established by the US

Board on

> Geographic names, which, granted are a little obscure (LO for

Slovenia, EZ

> for the Czech Republic, TC for UAE, BH for Belize)

Tut tut. The State Department doesn't seem to have been keeping up
with the FIPS 10-4 Publication Change Notices at
http://164.214.2.59/gns/html/fips/fips_files.html
Although the State Department website does give TC as the FIPS
diagraph for the UAE, this code was changed to AE by the first
Publication Change Notice on 1 Dec 1998.

> Where do you guys come up with
> your digraphs? Perhaps we should use the UN trigraph system?

I do find the digraphs confusing - there have been a couple of
occasions recently when everyone has been communicating is a sort of
ISO/FIPS hybrid, the meaning of which was only obvious from context.
So I, too, would prefer the trigraphs because it's usually obvious to
the reader what country is being indicated, without looking up a
table. But imagine the confusion if we mix tri- and di-graphs! Do
those six letters refer to a digraph tripoint or a trigraph border?
Aaaaaargh.

(For anyone interested in the ludicrous number of different country
codes available, I uploaded a summary to the Files area a while back.)

Grant