National Language Support (NLS) provides a standardized method of supporting multiple international locales, code pages, input methods, sort orders, and number/currency/time/date formats. The Win32 NLS API provides developers with a way to access system-provided Unicode-to-ANSI and ANSI-to-Unicode conversion services. Windows NT 4.0 is supplied with EBCDIC-to-Unicode and Unicode-to-EBCDIC translation tables for all of the popular host code pages.
The SNANLS API leverages the existing work done to support the NLS API on Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0. The SNA Server group is taking advantage of these EBCDIC-to-Unicode-to-ANSI and ANSI-to-Unicode-to-EBCDIC code page conversion services. Currently, the Win32 NLS API only supports SBCS EBCDIC code pages. However, future versions of the NLS API will support DBCS EBCDIC. (This is why SNANLS currently uses TrnsDT for DBCS conversions.)