ISO 4217 "ruble". In addition to codes for most active national currencies ISO 4217 provides codes for "supranational" currencies, procedural purposes, and several things which are "similar to" currencies: The use of an initial letter "X" for these purposes is facilitated by the ISO 3166 rule that no official country code beginning with X will ever be assigned. Because of this rule ISO 4217 can use X codes without risk of clashing with a future country code. ISO 3166 country codes beginning with "X" are used for private custom use (reserved), never for official codes. For instance, the ISO 3166-based NATO country
Standards organization that economy in ISO; ISO currently has 161 members. National standards bodies usually do not prepare the technical content of standards, which instead is developed by national technical societies. NSBs may be either public or private sector organizations, or combinations of the two. For example, the Standards Council of Canada is a Canadian Crown Corporation, Dirección General de Normas is a governmental agency within the Mexican Ministry of Economy, and ANSI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit U.S. organization with members from both the private and public sectors. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. government's standards agency, cooperates