Challenges of Localizing Currencies, Numbers, Dates, and Times Click on the banner to return to the user guide home page. If you write applications for cultures other than your own, you will soon confront the challenges of representing currencies, numbers, dates, and times.
Currencies vary in both unit value and notation.
Often a program must display values in notations customary to both vendor and customer. Scheduling, a common software function, involves time and calendar calculations. Local versions of the Gregorian calendar use different names for days of the week and months, and different ordering for the components of a date. It offers no help for conversion from strings to these types, and almost no help for conversions involving two or more locales.