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Section 3:
Conformance

Implementations which conform to this specification are required to provide the following.

3.1 Cultural Specification

Default localised cultural specifications of the cultural description source files specified by ISO/IEC 14652 and ISO/IEC 14651 in the form of the binary files whose format is specified in sections 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of this specification.

NOTE It is expected that an implementation may wish to provide one or more specific culture specifications - in addition to the mandatory default one specified in the standards.

3.2 Resource Files

The localisation of a culture requires that all values and "messages"e; be defined for a culture and not in the source text of a program. Such files shall be specified in the natural language and encoding of the default culture.

NOTE It is expected that an implementation may wish to provide message files corresponding to one or more specific culture specifications - in addition to the mandatory default files specified below.

3.2.1 Value Files

All classes required by the language specification having values which cannot be constructed in a way specified by the above standards (eg the class BOOL - requiring the text string representations "True" and "False") shall have a corresponding resource message file defined in accordance with the form described in section 5.2.

3.2.2 Message Files

All classes required by the language specification which need to interact with the execution environment using text messages shall have a corresponding message file containing Sather formatting descriptor text strings corresponding to the interaction requirements of the class concerned.

3.3 Utilities

A conforming implementation shall provide the following utility programs, together with appropriate documentation on their use.

  1. Cultural Compiler - this utility is required to prepare cultural specifications from their standard textual specification (see Section 2 for references) into an implementation-dependent form for use when executing Sather programs in the culture specified.
  2. Code Converter - this utility is required to convert any message file from one encoding to another provided that the characters contained are all contained in both source and target encodings, else an indication shall be given of the characters in the source for which the encoding could not be converted.

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Comments or enquiries should be made to Keith Hopper .
Page last modified: Tuesday, 24 October 2000.
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