Re: ISO 3166-1 Newsletter V-8 on Serbia and Montenegro published

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

On onsdag, jul 23, 2003, at 22:28 Europe/Stockholm, John C Klensin 
wrote:

> They have a whole hierarchy of "reserved" codes that are not to be 
> reused except under the most unusual of circumstances, and the 
> most-reserved of those lists is "used to be a country code, isn't any 
> longer".
This is the key part which I hope answers your question Mike? ISO 3166 
will simply in realty _NEVER_ reassign a code which has been a country 
to another country.

Yes, that means we one day might run out of codes, but, with the (low) 
rate of new countries in the world we will not have any problem soon.

And, IF they need to reassign something, they (ISO 3166) use the same 
mechanics as when assigning a new code. They prefer to (a) use what 
other organizations are using (b) minimize the amount of collissions. 
So, if "the Internet" uses an old code AA, but not BB (in reality) and 
both are old codes, the likelyhood that BB will be reused long before 
AA is very very high.

I.e. ISO 3166 people do talk with people before they make their 
decisions. They are VERY careful before making decisions (for obvious 
reasons).

   paf