1

Internationalization

A product can support up to four levels of internationalization:

•Level 1—Allows native-language characters (such as the a-umlaut). This is

referred to as the 8-bit clean model because the eighth bit in each byte is used to represent native-language characters.

• Level 2—Recognizes and displays international date and time formats, such as 26.07.90 in Italian; international decimal units, such as 1.234.567,89 in French; and international monetary units, such as 1.234,56 Pts in Spanish.

•

•

Level 3—Contains support for localized messages and text presentation.

Level 4—Contains Asian language support.

Pascal supports all four levels. See the Pascal 4.0 Reference Manual for a description of the date and time functions in internationalized formats.

Pascal does not allow input and output in the various international formats. If it does, it does not comply with the Pascal language standard, ANSI/IEEE 770 X3.97-1983.

For example, the standard specifies a period (.) as the decimal unit in the floating-point representation. Consider the following program, which prints a floating-point value:

program sample(output);

var r : real := 1.2;

begin writeln(r);

end.

When you compile and run the program on the internationalized Pascal compiler, the output is:

1.20000000000000e+00

4

Pascal 4.0 User’s Guide