Processing data in an international environment

COBOL for AIX supports Unicode UTF-16 as national character data at run time. UTF-16 provides a consistent and efficient way to encode plain text. Using UTF-16, you can develop software that will work with various national languages.

Use these COBOL facilities to code and compile programs that process national data and culturally sensitive collation orders for such data:

You can also take advantage of implicit conversions of alphanumeric or DBCS data items to national representation. The compiler performs such conversions (in most cases) when you move these items to national data items, or compare these items with national data items.

related references  
COBOL statements and national data  
Intrinsic functions and national data  
NCOLLSEQ
  
NSYMBOL  
Classes and categories of data (COBOL for AIX Language Reference)  
Data categories and PICTURE rules (COBOL for AIX Language Reference)  
MOVE statement (COBOL for AIX Language Reference)  
General relation conditions (COBOL for AIX Language Reference)