You can write applications to reflect the cultural conventions of the locale in effect when the applications are run. Cultural conventions include sort order, character classification, and national language; and formats of dates and times, numbers, monetary units, postal addresses, and telephone numbers.
With COBOL for Windows, you can select the appropriate code pages and collating sequences, and you can use language elements and compiler options to handle Unicode, single-byte character sets, and double-byte character sets (DBCS).
related concepts
The active locale
related tasks
Specifying the code page with a locale
Using environment variables to specify a locale
Controlling the collating sequence with a locale
Accessing the active locale and code-page values