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<h3 class="section">7.5 Standard Locales</h3>

<p>The only locale names you can count on finding on all operating systems
are these three standard ones:

     <dl>
<dt><code>"C"</code><dd>This is the standard C locale.  The attributes and behavior it provides
are specified in the ISO&nbsp;C<!-- /@w --> standard.  When your program starts up, it
initially uses this locale by default.

     <br><dt><code>"POSIX"</code><dd>This is the standard POSIX locale.  Currently, it is an alias for the
standard C locale.

     <br><dt><code>""</code><dd>The empty name says to select a locale based on environment variables. 
See <a href="Locale-Categories.html#Locale-Categories">Locale Categories</a>. 
</dl>

   <p>Defining and installing named locales is normally a responsibility of
the system administrator at your site (or the person who installed the
GNU C library).  It is also possible for the user to create private
locales.  All this will be discussed later when describing the tool to
do so. 
<!-- (@pxref{Building Locale Files}). -->

   <p>If your program needs to use something other than the &lsquo;<samp><span class="samp">C</span></samp>&rsquo; locale,
it will be more portable if you use whatever locale the user specifies
with the environment, rather than trying to specify some non-standard
locale explicitly by name.  Remember, different machines might have
different sets of locales installed.

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