In VA Smalltalk, the six locale categories defined by the POSIX model are supported by the classes LCCollate, LCCType, LCMonetary, LCMessages, LCNumeric, and LCTime. The class Locale provides access to the current settings of locale categories, and protocols to update locale categories from values specified by the operating system.

An instance of class Locale is created and initialized with the currently configured platform locale information at image startup. This instance is known as the current locale and can be accessed by sending current to the Locale class. The current locale cannot be set explicitly, only initialized from operating system values.

The current locale maintains instances of the LCCollate, LCCType, LCMonetary, LCMessages, LCNumeric, and LCTime classes that are used to control date and time printing, character sorting, and string sorting. A detailed description of these objects, and the protocols used to access them, is presented in the sections entitled Obtaining Locale, LCCType, and LCCollate objects and Obtaining LCMessages, LCMonetary, LCNumeric, and LCTime objects. All applications concerned with NLS enablement should use the information available from the current locale.