A locale is a collection of data that encodes information about a cultural environment. The active locale is the locale that is in effect when you compile or run your program. You can establish a cultural environment for an application by specifying the active locale.
Only one locale can be active at a time.
The active locale affects the behavior of these culturally sensitive interfaces for the entire program:
The active locale does not affect the following items, for which Standard COBOL 85 defines specific language and behavior:
The active locale determines the code page for compiling and running programs:
The evaluation of literal values in the source program is handled with the locale that is active at compile time. For example, the conversion of national literals from the source representation to UTF-16 for running the program uses the compile-time locale.
COBOL for Windows determines the setting of the active locale from a combination of the applicable environment variables and system settings. Environment variables are used first. If an applicable locale category is not defined by environment variables, COBOL uses defaults and system settings.
related concepts
Determination of the locale from system settings
related tasks
Specifying the code page with a locale
Using environment variables to specify a locale
Controlling the collating sequence with a locale
related references
Types of messages for which translations are available