FIPS two-letter country codes/Talk

Question: What reason does the US government have for using this instead of ISO 3166? Is this just another example of the American insistence on doing everything different from everyone else in the world? -- SJK

When was FIPS introduced? If it predates ISO 3166 (which first appeared in 1974), then it would be understandable that they didn't want all the work of switching over. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 17

Surely it can't be that difficult to switch? One can write a program in five minutes to do the conversion. -- SJK

And what about the paper documentation? --Zundark, 2001 Nov 17

Country codes were invented for use in computer data processing. Their primary use is for computer purposes (thats why it is a FIPS -- Federal Information Processing Standard). I doubt much paper documentation uses them. But even if it did, all they'd need is an internal style guide or something that said "we use the following country codes from ISO 3166 for all new documents:... some documentation produced before the changeover uses the obsolete FIPS country codes, which are listed below:". Problem solved -- SJK

Even if all the data is in electronic format, there is much more to be done than just writing a 5-minute program. And converting everything would achieve nothing anyway, since FIPS codes serve their purpose as well as, or better than, ISO codes would. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 17

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>Surely it can't be that difficult to switch? One can write a >program in five minutes to do the conversion. -- SJK

Please consider routing out ths change in all of the thousands of computer programs, hundreds of thousands/millions of documents, etc. used the the US government.

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One of the drawbacks of such a code is that defunct entities may not have codes (Orange Free State for example)