Elements of
Internationalization
The typical elements of cultural environment
are as follows:
- Native language
The text that an executing program uses to
communicate with a user or environment. That is, the
natural language of the end user.
- Character sets and coded character
sets
The mapping of the characters used in a
particular language, a language, and a collating sequence
on to the set of hexadecimal values (code points) that
uniquely identify each character. This mapping creates
the coded character set, which is uniquely identified by
the character set it encodes, the set of code point
values, and the mapping between the two.
- Collating and ordering
The relative ordering of characters used for sorting
- Character classification
The type of character (alphabetic, numeric,
etc.) represented by a code point
- Character case conversion
The mapping between uppercase and lowercase
characters within a single character set
- Date and time format
The format of date and time data
- Number format
The format of numbers and monetary units
Note: The IBM C and C++ Compilers and library
support of internationalization is based on the IEEE POSIX
P1003.2 and X/Open Portability Guide (XPG4) standards for global
locales and coded character set conversion, with the following
exceptions:
- The grouping arguments in the LC_NUMERIC
and LC_MONETARY locale categories must be strings, not
sets of integers.
- The use of the ellipsis (...) in the
LC_COLLATE locale category is limited.

Internationalization
Localization and
Locales

Make Your Program
International

Locale
Categories