Hello Nick!
It depends what you want to do with classes. If you use e.g. the AFDKO’s kern feature generation macro, then it needs some identifiers in the class name indicating if a class is a leftside or rightside class (’_RIGHT’ or ’_LEFT’ or absence of them if the class is used on both sides), or if it covers glyphs of a specific script (like ’_LAT’ in your example).
For example, I use a macro to set the left/right checkboxes in the Classes Panel, based on a ’_1ST’ or ’_2ND’ identifier. I found that class names are more reliable than the checkbox settings themselves which I lost one or two times.
But even without use of macros, these identifiers are pretty helpful because the class name tells you at once: Latin, lowercase, rightside class, for a and relatives.
No idea what the 2 means here ...

Thanks Karsten!
A mine of information, as always.

Karsten is in a class by himself! :-)

ChrisL

Quite so!

_karsten: karsten’

ChrisL

sub alepaul’ @all by karsten; will be what I need. LOL.