I'm trying to understand every bit of the ECMAScript spec and I ran across this line in Section 2 (pretty much the first page) that follows:
A conforming implementation of ECMAScript that provides an application programming interface that supports programs that need to adapt to the linguistic and cultural conventions used by different human languages and countries must implement the interface defined by the most recent edition of ECMA‐402 that is compatible with this specification.
Can anyone explain what is meant by needing to adapt to the linguistic and cultural conventions used by different human languages...? Or what any of this means really.
"Adapt to the conventions used by different human languages" might, for example, include presenting the name of the eighth month of the Gregorian calendar as "agosto" (as it is here in Perú) instead of "August" (abbreviated "ago" and "Aug", respectively; note the difference in capitalization). Or it might even mean presenting the current year as 5776, 1437 or 4713 (Islamic, Jewish, and Chinese calendars, respectively). It might involve presenting the approximate value of π as 3,14 (as it would be in Paris) instead of 3.14. And so on and so forth.
ECMA-402 provides a variety of ECMAScript API extensions which allow for such customizations.