Message facility

It is necessary to keep messages separate from the program by providing them in the form of message catalogs that the program can access at run time. This arrangement facilitates translations of messages into various languages and make them available to a program based on a user's locale. To aid in this task, commands and subroutines are provided by the Message Facility.

Message source files containing application messages are created by the programmer and converted to message catalogs. The application uses these catalogs to retrieve and display messages, as needed. Translating message source files into other languages and then converting the files to message catalogs does not require changing and recompiling a program.