LOCALE - mfx - 3.1

LOCALE controls cultural environment processing, allowing you to choose an alternative set of collating rules based on a specified national language. For SORT/MERGE processing, the alternative collating applies to character (CH) fields. For INCLUDE/OMIT comparison processing, the alternative collating applies to character fields and hexadecimal constants compared to character fields.

MFX employs the callable services of IBM’s Language Environment for z/OS to collate data in a way that conforms to the language and conventions of a selected locale. A locale defines single and multi-character collating rules for a cultural environment. Numerous predefined locales are available.

NONE, the default setting for LOCALE, results in normal EBCDIC collating.

CURRENT directs MFX to use the locale active when MFX begins.

name is the name of a supplied or user-defined locale that is to be active during MFX processing. A locale name may be up to 32 characters and is not case sensitive. The locale active just before MFX processing begins will be restored when MFX processing completes. The following is a list of locales provided with the IBM National Language Resources Feature of LE/370.

Table 1. Defined Locales LocaleName Language Country C     DA_DK Danish Denmark DE_CH German Switzerland DE_DE German Germany EL_GR Greek Greece EN_GB English United Kingdom EN_JP English Japan EN_US English United States ES_ES Spanish Spain FI_FI Finnish Finland FR_BE French Belgium FR_CA French Canada FR_CH French Switzerland FR_FR French France IS_IS Icelandic Iceland IT_IT Italian Italy JA_JP Japanese Japan NL_BE Dutch Belgium NL_NL Dutch Netherlands NO_NO Norwegian Norway PT_PT Portuguese Portugal SV_SE Swedish Sweden TR_TR Turkish Turkey

Notes:

1. Make sure the JCL gives MFX access to the library that contains the loadable locale routines. For the supplied locales, these are the dynamically loadable routines in the IBM AD/Cycle LE/370 library. For more information, see the IBM publication Language Environment for z/OS & VM Installation and Customization Guide, SC26-4817.

2. If locale processing is used for fields specified in a SORT or MERGE control statement, VLTEST=1 will be forced on in addition to any other VLTEST options in effect. VLTEST=1 will cause MFX to terminate if a variable-length input record does not contain all SORT/MERGE control fields.

3. Although locale processing can improve performance compared to external collating routines, it should be used only when necessary. Locale processing can significantly degrade SORT/MERGE and INCLUDE/OMIT performance compared to normal collating.

4. An E61 exit cannot be used with locale processing.

5. Locale processing requires additional main storage to support the use of the IBM Language Environment facilities. For those jobs that use locale, the below-the-line region size should be increased by 1000K to accommodate the storage needs of the Language Environment modules.