Setting the country code

You can use the COUNTRY runtime option or the CEE3CTY callable service to set the current country code for your application. The country code determines the default formats used to display and print the date and timestamps in the reports generated by the RPTSTG runtime option, RPTOPTS runtime option, and the CEE3DMP (dump) callable service. Default values associated with the country code also describe the currency symbol, decimal separator, and thousands separator.

Because CEE3LNG and CEE3CTY allow you to maintain multiple national languages and country settings on separate LIFO stacks, you can easily reset the national language or alternate between different country settings. For example, if you want to ensure that a routine in your application outputs the date and time in a Japanese format, use CEE3CTY to query the current default setting and, if necessary, to set it to Japanese with CEE3CTY if some other country code is in effect. For sample user code, see z/OS Language Environment Programming Reference.

The C/C++ language provides locales, which are UNIX structures that reflect different linguistic, cultural, and territorial conventions. Locale-sensitive C language functions make use of values and formats in the currently loaded locale. The Locale callable services exploit a subset of these C library interfaces for internationalized applications. See Locale callable services for more information.

However, although the National Language Support callable services have some functional overlap with the Locale callable services, the two sets of services are completely independent of each other. Locale settings and the COUNTRY runtime option do not affect each other. Likewise, the Locale callable services and the National Language Support callable services are mutually exclusive. The National Language Support callable services derive values and formats only from defaults established by the COUNTRY runtime option or the CEE3CNTY service.

Language Environment does not currently support certain languages as national languages, so you would not be able to use CEE3LNG to set the national language to an unsupported language. You can, however, change the date and time format so that your English or Japanese banking application, for example, would display the default date and time format for an unsupported language. In general, you must use CEE3CTY to set the conventions for formatting date and time information.