-Locales these days have been mostly been supplanted by Unicode, but Perl
-continues to support them. See L</Unicode and UTF-8> below.
-
-Perl supports language-specific notions of data such as "is this
-a letter", "what is the uppercase equivalent of this letter", and
-"which of these letters comes first". These are important issues,
-especially for languages other than English--but also for English: it
-would be naE<iuml>ve to imagine that C<A-Za-z> defines all the "letters"
-needed to write correct English. Perl is also aware that some character other
-than "." may be preferred as a decimal point, and that output date
-representations may be language-specific. The process of making an
-application take account of its users' preferences in such matters is
-called B<internationalization> (often abbreviated as B<i18n>); telling
-such an application about a particular set of preferences is known as
-B<localization> (B<l10n>).
-
-Perl can understand language-specific data via the standardized (ISO C,
-XPG4, POSIX 1.c) method called "the locale system". The locale system is
-controlled per application using one pragma, one function call, and
-several environment variables.
-
-B<NOTE>: This feature is new in Perl 5.004, and does not apply unless an
-application specifically requests it--see L<Backward compatibility>.
-The one exception is that write() now B<always> uses the current locale
-- see L<"NOTES">.
+In the beginning there was ASCII, the "American Standard Code for
+Information Interchange", which works quite well for Americans with
+their English alphabet and dollar-denominated currency. But it doesn't
+work so well even for other English speakers, who may use different
+currencies, such as the pound sterling (as the symbol for that currency
+is not in ASCII); and it's hopelessly inadequate for many of the
+thousands of the world's other languages.
+
+To address these deficiencies, the concept of locales was invented
+(formally the ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c "locale system"). And applications
+were and are being written that use the locale mechanism. The process of
+making such an application take account of its users' preferences in
+these kinds of matters is called B<internationalization> (often
+abbreviated as B<i18n>); telling such an application about a particular
+set of preferences is known as B<localization> (B<l10n>).
+
+Perl was extended to support the locale system. This
+is controlled per application by using one pragma, one function call,
+and several environment variables.
+
+Unfortunately, there are quite a few deficiencies with the design (and
+often, the implementations) of locales, and their use for character sets
+has mostly been supplanted by Unicode (see L<perlunitut> for an
+introduction to that, and keep on reading here for how Unicode interacts
+with locales in Perl).
+
+Perl continues to support the old locale system, and starting in v5.16,
+provides a hybrid way to use the Unicode character set, along with the
+other portions of locales that may not be so problematic.
+(Unicode is also creating C<CLDR>, the "Common Locale Data Repository",
+L<http://cldr.unicode.org/> which includes more types of information than
+are available in the POSIX locale system. At the time of this writing,
+there was no CPAN module that provides access to this XML-encoded data.
+However, many of its locales have the POSIX-only data extracted, and are
+available at L<http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/>.)
+
+=head1 WHAT IS A LOCALE
+
+A locale is a set of data that describes various aspects of how various
+communities in the world categorize their world. These categories are
+broken down into the following types (some of which include a brief
+note here):
+
+=over
+
+=item Category LC_NUMERIC: Numeric formatting
+
+This indicates how numbers should be formatted for human readability,
+for example the character used as the decimal point.
+
+=item Category LC_MONETARY: Formatting of monetary amounts
+
+=for comment
+The nbsp below makes this look better
+
+E<160>
+
+=item Category LC_TIME: Date/Time formatting
+
+=for comment
+The nbsp below makes this look better
+
+E<160>
+
+=item Category LC_MESSAGES: Error and other messages
+
+This for the most part is beyond the scope of Perl
+
+=item Category LC_COLLATE: Collation
+
+This indicates the ordering of letters for comparision and sorting.
+In Latin alphabets, for example, "b", generally follows "a".
+
+=item Category LC_CTYPE: Character Types
+
+This indicates, for example if a character is an uppercase letter.
+
+=back
+
+More details on the categories are given below in L</LOCALE CATEGORIES>.
+
+Together, these categories go a long way towards being able to customize
+a single program to run in many different locations. But there are
+deficiencies, so keep reading.