About this book

The IBM OS/2 is an international operating system whose localized editions are available for Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages. These localized editions are called OS/2 NLV (National Language Version) altogether. In this book we attempt to show you how to implement an internationalized application using XPG4 C functions on the IBM OS/2 Warp environment.

This book is based on each NLV of the IBM OS/2 Warp together with IBM Visual Age C++ for OS/2, and may not be 100% applicable to any other releases. We intend this guide primarily for Presentation Manager application programs, although some of the topics covered in this book are applicable to full-screen and text-windowed application programs as well.

Note: This book features XPG4 (X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4) C functions, and some of NLS/DBCS related facilities provided by IBM OS/2 Warp are not covered. However, some of the sample programs referred in this document are taken out from the other application primer, IBM OS/2 DBCS Application Primer for DBCS OS/2 V2.1(DTCO-0011-2), which explains how to implement DBCS-enabled application by using OS/2 native functions only.

The major topics discussed in this book are as follows:

• Basic information on the difference between DBCS OS/2 Warp and SBCS OS/2 Warp

• Basic information on XPG4 Internationalization

• Development environment

• Basic concept of locale and locale-dependent functions in XPG4

• Processing wide-character strings

• Wide stream I/O

• Interface between a wide-character string and PM API

• Device-independent PM programming

• Resource isolation and dynamic loading

Any considerations unique to a particular Asian language, such as the Japanese grammatical check, are out of our scope.