This chapter describes GT.M facilities for customers using M in non-English oriented environments with characters encoded in eight-bit units. The internal mechanisms necessary to implement the GT.M internationalization facilities may not be available on your system. Before continuing with the implementation provided in this chapter refer to the product release notes that accompanied your GT.M shipment. These facilities address the specific issues of defining alternative collation sequences, and defining unique patterns for use with the pattern match operator. The details of each facility are described in separate sections of this chapter.

Alternative collation sequences can be defined for global and local variable subscripts. They can be established for specified globals or for an entire database. The alternative sequences are defined by a series of routines in an executable file pointed to by a logical name. Because the collation sequence is implemented by a user-supplied program, virtually any collation policy may be implemented. Detailed information on establishing alternative collation sequences and defining the logical name is provided in the "Collation Sequence Definitions" section of this chapter.

M has defined pattern classes that serve as arguments to the pattern match operator. GT.M supports user definition of additional pattern classes as well as redefinition of the standard pattern classes. Specific patterns are defined in a text file that is pointed to by a logical name. Pattern classes may be re-defined dynamically. The details of defining these pattern classes and the logical name are described in the section called "Matching Alternative Patterns".