As a developer, you belong to an international community. Whatever your nation, you share with other developers the problems of adapting software and applications for your own culture and others. Accommodating the needs of users in different cultures is called localization; making software that can be easily localized is called internationalization.

The Essential Tools Module is made in the United States. It is internationalized in the sense that it provides the framework you need to localize fundamental aspects of different cultures, such as alphabets, languages, currencies, numbers, and date- and time-keeping notations. With the Essential Tools Module, you write a single application you can ship to any country. When your application is executed, it will be able to process times, dates, strings, and currency in the native format.

The Essential Tools Module supports internationalizing and localizing of your applications. Most of that support comes via a useful and flexible interface to the functionality found in POSIX, C, and the C++ Standard Library. By acting as a wrapper for these core capabilities, the module allows you to handle different locales under program control, including multiple locales at the same time, or in different threads.

The Essential Tools Module class library is usable with any eight-bit clean or sixteen-bit Unicode encoding.

Table 17: Internationalization Classes