INTRODUCTION

The premise of the Locales:: package is simply to offer an internationalized
version of the Locale:: package.  The modules (Language and Country so far)
themselves are available in localized subpackages.  That is, you
can get Language and Country names back in something other than English.

At this time the package should be considered experimental.  POD documentation
is forth coming and should appear in the next release, the scripts in the
"examples/" directory presently serve as a reference.  The scripts in this
directory also indicate the extent of testing.


USAGE

The Locales::Language module (and others) may be used just like the
Locale::Language module, but you can pass your desired language at import
time to set it as a default:

  use Locales::Language ( "fr" );

  print code2language ( "en" ), "\n";  # prints "Anglais"

The Locale module can also be used with an OO interface:

  require Locales::Language;  # uses the envirornment locale

  my $fr = new Locales::Language ( "fr" );
  print $fr->code2language ( "en" ), "\n";  # prints "Anglais"

Much of the pacakge's complexity is owed in part to maintaining both
an OO and functional interfaces.

The language modules can themselves be used directly to instantiate
objects, but do not export any functions.


  require Locales::Language::de;
  require Locales::Language::fr;

  my $de = new Locales::Language::de;
  my $fr = new Locales::Language::fr;

  print $de->code2language ( "en" ), "\n";  # prints "Englisch"
  print $fr->code2language ( "en" ), "\n";  # prints "Anglais"


LANGUAGES & RELIABILITY

The data used in Locales:: comes directly from the ICU CVS repository:

  http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/locale/icu/xml/

Supported languages at this time are:

  am, de, el, en, es, fa, fi, fr, hi, ja, ko, ru & zh


DIFFERENCES FROM Locale::

  * Not limited to English.
  * Presently only the ::Country and ::Language modules are provided.
  * OO Interface available.
  * Should consume less memory than Locale:: as hash data is linked
    instead of copied.
  

WHY NOT INTEGRATE INTO Locale:: ?

Tried that, but the maintainer has yet to respond to such inquiries
(nudge, nudge).


TODO

  * Write the POD.
  * Test (much) more thoroughly.
  * Add the ISO 639 Alpha 3 language codes (why are they missing)?
  * Test on older Perl (tried only on 5.8.0).
  * Add more ICU packages.
  * Port the Locale::Currency and Locale::Script modules.  Non-English
    data may be harder to come by, but if nothing else the English
    data is at least available through an OO interface.
