You can write applications to reflect the cultural conventions of the locale that is in effect when the applications are run. Cultural conventions include sort order, character classification, and national language; and formats of dates and times, numbers, monetary units, postal addresses, and telephone numbers.
With COBOL for AIX, you can select the appropriate code pages and collating sequences, and you can use language elements and compiler options to handle Unicode, single-byte character sets, and double-byte character sets (DBCS).
related concepts
The active locale