For example, character sets, sort order, text direction, and formats for data such as date and currency are used to describe the unique characteristics of a locale. For each different locale, information such as menu items, help information, and user prompts is defined and stored separately. An application designed to run in different locales examines certain resources and environment variables in order to determine which language to use when executed. An application establishes file search paths for resource files and other language-dependent information. There is a wide variety of information that can be localized.
Localized information is stored in files that reside in different directories.
An internationalized application can set its locale at run time, typically using an internal procedure called a language procedure. The language procedure processes data in your user environment and sets the application's locale. This feature enables you to modify your user environment and rerun an application in a different locale. An application can use a default language procedure or supply its own procedure. As a result, two applications can process the same user environment data with different results.