Avoid Hard-coding

Minimize hard-cording of country-, code-page- or device-unique information in your program.

• Utilize query functions of the system.

• If no appropriate system functions are available, isolate such information from executable code.

Following are the advantages of the single module programming style:

• A single object module can support both SBCS and DBCS languages. If your program is running on SBCS code pages, the contents of the environment vector are nulls and your check logic just recognizes all bytes as SBCS characters (although you may separate logics for SBCS from those for DBCS if performance is critical for your product).

• A single object module can support all DBCS languages since your program will not contain such country-unique information but rather get the information from the system at run time.

• Your program can be flexible to the addition of new code pages supported in DBCS OS/2. For example, if the relation between code pages and the vectors are hard-coded in your program for previous OS/2 version, your program should be modified to support the code pages which are new to the later OS/2 version.