locales

[Doug Gwyn]

The concept of locale in itself doesn't solve character set problems
such as Spanish ch, German ss, or Asian (16-bit) codes.  However, it
does provide the necessary hook to write applications that operate
either in an environment-independent manner (as system software
generally should) or in a locally-customized environment (as human
interface software normally should).

There is a string-to-string mapping strxfrm (formerly strcoll) for
the purpose of turning a "natural native" character string into
something amenable to collation.  This mechanism doesn't solve the
general multi-byte character problem; a presentation of the issues
involved there (and hopefully a solution) are planned for the next
X3J11 meeting.