Concepts in C/UNIX Internationalisation

This document is for use by students of software internationalisation as a reference for the terms and concepts that are useful in the internationalisation of software written in the C programming language, running in a UNIX environment. A person working in this area is expected to have access to the standards documents and man pages from the appropriate vendor.

The standards associated with internationalisation are constantly evolving. The concepts presented here represent a snapshot (or a first approximation) of XPG3/XPG4, POSIX.1-1988, POSIX.2, and ANSI-C. Also included are some supplementary concepts from AIX and SVR4, the X-Window System, Motif, and a few other sources such as magazine articles, that I have found helpful in understanding the issues. Many of the definitions are plagerized from these sources verbatum, and the sources will hopefully be clear from the context.

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• Overview
  
• Standards
  
• ISO Standards
  
• XPG4
  

Locales

• C Locale
  

Categories

• Time Category
  
• Monetary Category
  
• Numeric Category
  
• Yes and No Response Category
  
• Messages Category
  

Single Byte Codesets

Characters

• Signed Characters
  
• Character Collation
  
• Equivalence Classes
  
• Character Classification
  
• Case Conversion
  

Regular Expressions

Multi-byte Codesets

• EUC
  
• Unicode
  
• ISO-10646
  
• ISO-2022
  

Non-Western Locales

• Asian Locales
  
  • Japanese
    
• Exotic Locales
  

OSF

X-Windows internationalisation

• Text Widgets
  
• X11R5
  
• Motif
  

Functions

Naming Conventions

• System Names
  
• File Names
  
• User Names
  

Keyboards

Extra Notes

Conclusion