| The application locale / Locale and character set basics | |
On a UNIX™ box, you have the LANG / LC_ALL environment variables to define the locale. Each process / terminal can set its own locale. By default this is en_US.utf8 on recent UNIX systems. You can query for available locales with the locale -a command. Some systems come with only a few locales installed, you must then install an additional package to get more languages. You must also define the correct character set in the terminal (xterm or gnome-term), otherwise non-ASCII characters will not display properly.
On Windows™ platforms, for non-UNICODE (i.e. non-UTF-16/UCS-2) applications, you have ACP and OEMCP code pages. ACP stands for ANSI Code Page and were designed by Microsoft™ for first GUI applications, while OEMCP defines old code pages for MS/DOS console applications. You can select the default ACP/OEMCP code pages for non-UNICODE application in the language and regional settings panel of Windows (make sure you define the settings for non-UNICODE applications, this is done in the "Advanced" panel on Windows XP). Code page can be changed in each console window with the chcp command. With Genero Business Development Language, you can use the LANG environment variable on Windows to define the character set for BDL. However, it is strongly recommended to use the default Windows system locale and avoid to set LANG on Windows.