The National Locale Support (NLS) facility provides an automatic means of adapting your program to the character code set, collating sequence, and editing symbols associated with a particular country, without the need for your application to know what these are in advance. This facility is also useful in English-speaking countries for handling codepages, collating upper- and lower-case letters correctly and selecting the appropriate currency symbol.
If full-screen ACCEPTs are to be used, you must set the range of data keys to be accepted in the adisctrl database. Your COBOL development system attempts to provide the appropriate national language tables for the language, country and character set selected by the user.
The NLS facility provides you with the means to access the following features which are associated with particular countries and codepages:
NLS can also be used to create message files for your applications. These message files can contain error messages, but can also contain any other messages that need to be displayed by your application.
If you want to sort index files according to the local collating sequence rather than the ASCII collating sequence, you must specify the IXNLSKEY directive.