HP 9000 User Manual page 81

6
To develop an internationalized program, you must:
• Use NLS routines to handle data in a language-sensitive way.
• Query language tables for locale-specific formatting conventions.
• Learn to use message catalogs.
When developing an international program, identify those areas of the program
that are language dependent. Structure your program so that it uses NLS
routines to query the language tables of the user's native language for language
dependent information. Use message catalogs instead of hard-coded messages,
(see Chapter 7).
Other Aspects
Designing an international program with NLS is usually a straightforward
process. Nevertheless, there are a number of special considerations. For
example, make sure you reserve enough space in arrays and other data
structures to accommodate wide characters. Since an international program
supports character sets that contain multi-byte characters, the number of
characters in a string is no longer equivalent to the number of bytes. You must
allocate additional space to accommodate the larger character size.
We mention these special considerations before delving into the details of NLS
in order to provide you with some of the "flavor" of international design. If you
prefer, you can deal with these issues later. Now that the scope of international
design has been outlined in general terms, it is time to begin the design
process in earnest. The first thing you must do is to provide the appropriate
initialization.
6-4 Developing International Software