10.2 Developing International Software Using DEC C

The DEC C environment provides the following facilities for creating international software:

• A method for separating localization data from a program.

  Localization data is held in a database known as a locale. This stores all the language and culture information required by a program. See Section 10.3 for details of the structure of locales.

  A program specifies what locales to use by calling the setlocale function. See Section 10.4 for more information.

• A method of separating message text from the program source.

  This is achieved using message catalogs that store all the messages for an application. The message catalog is linked to the application at run-time. This means that the messages can be translated into different languages and then the required language version is selected at run-time. See Section 10.5.

• DEC C RTL functions that are sensitive to localization data.

  The DEC C RTL includes functions for:

  • Converting between different codesets. See Section 10.6.

  • Handling culture-specific information. See Section 10.7.

  • Multipass string collation. See Section 10.9.

• A special wide-character data type defined in the DEC C RTL makes it easier to handle codesets that have a mixture of single and multibyte characters. A set of functions is also defined to support this wide character data type. See Section 10.8.