Our rationale before was to stick to the ISO-3166 standard no matter what, since we don't want to get involved in territorial issues. However, in this case no information is lost and it would make a lot of people happier (and no one unhappy, I think), so I'm going to make an exception. Hope it's not a can of worms.
From now on, all English strings use the new syntax. They are not
eval()'ed any more and the only valid placeholders are {$a} and
{$a->foobar}. No extra quotes escaping, dollar sign escaping and putting
double percent signs.
The modified files were exported from AMOS database repository in the
new syntax and were re-ordered by stringid. Standard GNU/GPL and PHPdoc
blocks are added. Where there was no copyright note so far, I added the
default one with Martin Dougiamas as the copyright holder.
Live long and prosper.
so it can be translated.
There is now a new function get_list_of_countries() which will return a
sorted array of countries in the best current language.
get_string("AU", "countries") will also work if needed