Internationalization

Internationalization in the context of software usually means that an application respects certain conventions that are different in different countries.

MoStacks supports internationalization when dealing with the field types Float, Date and Time. The Windows and the Symbian program format values of those fields according to the conventions of the country that you specified in your Windows or Symbian control panel.

Values that you type are likewise analyzed and checked according to the same country-dependent conventions.

This all means that in most cases you can just type in those values as you ever do and as you do in all other applications that you use.

To illustrate, about half of all countries on this planet are "dot countries" where you separate the whole part and the fractional part of a float number with a dot, and the other half are "comma countries" where you use a comma to do the same. And most people nowadays are probably aware, thanks to the Internet, that there is a surprising number of conventions of how to write a date, like:

12/06/2007
12-06-2007
06.12.2007
2007-12-06

Independent Internal Storage

Internationalization only plays a role at the surface and influences how things are displayed or interpreted after you typed a field value.

It does not influence the way those values are internally stored. Values are stored in a general, country-independent way. It's no problem to send your MoStack with a lot of date and time values in it to your friends around the world living in countries with different conventions: They will see the correct values, formatted according to their rules.

There may be small, usually harmless display anomalies, however. If you have a list field with colums and a column shows dates, these dates may be shown in a wrong format, until you change something and MoStacks re-evaluates the list.