What Is Locale?

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│Locale is a description of a cultural environment such as date/time   │
│format and monetary sign.                                             │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

ISO/ANSI C has introduced the notion of a locale which is a description of a cultural environment. XPG4 inherits this notion.

A locale is the definition of the subset of a user's environment that depends on language and cultural conventions. It consists of one or more categories which correspond to the environment variables and control specific aspects of the behavior of components of the system.

The locale categories supported by IBM Visual Age C++ for OS/2 are as follows(**):

LC_CTYPE

defines the character classification, case conversion and other character attributes.
LC_COLLATE
provides collation sequence definition.
LC_MESSAGES
defines the format and values for affirmative and negative response.
LC_MONETARY
defines the rules and symbols used to format monetary numeric information.
LC_NUMERIC
defines the rules and symbols used to format non-monetary numeric information.
LC_TIME
defines the interpretation of the field descriptors supported by the date utility.

In addition, there is a value LC_ALL which is not one of the categories but used to refer to all categories.

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