In Asian countries, such as Korea, Japan, P.R.C. (People's Republic of China) and R.O.C. (Republic Of China), where ideographic characters are widely utilized, handling DBCS characters in addition to SBCS characters is a fundamental requirement for your programs to win popularity. IBM's world-wide applications have been programmed with special logic to support DBCS. However, as personal computers become widespread over customers, we are required to develop an application in a shorter cycle than before. The special coding for DBCS support has been reconsidered and it appears that we have to find out a more efficient way to achieve DBCS support.
The Internationalization and Localization methods provided by XPG4 is an answer. This chapter introduces XPG4 Internationalization facility and its advantage.