An internationalized system has no built-in assumptions or dependencies on code set, character classification, character comparison rules, character collation order, monetary formatting, numeric punctuation, date and time formatting, or the text of messages. A locale is defined by these language and cultural conventions. All of the information pertaining to language-specific and cultural-specific conventions is obtained at process run time.
All locale information must be accessible to programs at run time so that data is processed and displayed correctly for your language-specific and cultural-specific conventions. The National Language Support (NLS) system provides these localization capabilities. NLS provides a database containing locale-specific rules for formatting data and an interface to obtain these rules.
The following information is provided for maintaining the locale of your system: