Welcome to the IBM systems with DBCS (Double-Byte Character Set) support facilities! In Asian countries, such as Korea, Japan, PRC and ROC, where ideographic characters are widely utilized, handling DBCS characters in addition to SBCS characters is a fundamental requirement for your programs to win popularity. For example, users of your application programs demand to store DBCS data into data-bases, to see window contents and messages in their languages or to print reports in DBCS.
Before we start showing how to write an international application program, there are a few general things you need to know. Those are covered in this chapter.