### 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