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A-Shell Reference

Rewritten December 2023

LANGUAGE=pathname

A-Shell uses a language definition file (aka LDF) to define certain language- and locale- dependent parameters, such as:

translations of words for dates, yes/no, etc.
numeric formatting: use of commas, decimal points, currency symbol
date formatting: month-day-year vs day-month-year, separators
collating sequence

The specified pathname must be fully qualified; by convention the LDF files are stored in the equivalent of DSK0:[1,6].

The LDF file format is equivalent to the AMOS 2.x language definition file format. Several standard variations are supplied with A-Shell: ENGLSH, BRTISH, FRENCH, FRANGL, PORTUG, SPANSH, ITALIA, etc. Contact MicroSabio for information on creating your own variants.

A-Shell automatically relies on the LDF for several built-in functions such as those mentioned above. Applications may also query the LDF via the GTLANG subroutine, which see for a list of the specific parameters.

Examples

LANGUAGE=C:\VM\MIAME\DSK0\001006\ENGLSH.LDF

LANGUAGE=/vm/miame/dsk0/001004/brtish.ldf

 

See Also

SET

History

2009 January, A-Shell 5.1.1136:  LDF enhancements: New LDF files (each named by appending an "X" to the existing name) have been created to add a standard Latin 1 character collating sequence for the upper 128 characters. This may be an interim measure until we decide whether there is any reason not to just update the standard LDFs with the collating sequence. Until then, if you are interested in the collating sequence, either rename the "X" version to the standard name, or change the ERSATZ statement in miame.ini to reference the "X" version of the LDF.