Why isn't there a culture enum?

Question

Greetings,

I was wondering why there isn\'t a pre-set enum for cultures in C#? Since the cultures never change and are always like \"nl-NL, en-GB, en-US\".. why not make

Answer 1

Enumerations are fixed at compile time.

But the set of cultures varies at runtime:

• Different OS versions support different cultures
• OS updates (Service Packs, Language Interface Packs, ...) can add cultures
• Later .NET versions support more cultures (build assembly for one version and use it with another).

Answer 2

In addition to them changing, as suggested by others, you can create your own cultures and they would be conspicuously absent from the enum since you can't add items to it.

Answer 3

"Since the cultures never change"

Don't they? This article (Microsoft .NET Framework 4: What is New in Globalization) disagrees. In the past 5 years alone, a lot has changed in the region of Serbia for example, leading to new Cultures.

In the real world, the globalization information is constantly changing because of cultural developments in the local markets, because of new standards which update the culture sensitive information frequently, or because Microsoft finds more accurate information about different markets or expands into more markets.

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 supports a minimum of 354 cultures compared to a minimum of 203 cultures in the previous release. Many of those cultures are neutrals that were added to complete the parent chain to the root neutral culture.

For example, three Inuktitut neutrals were added to the already existing cultures Inuktitut (Syllabics, Canada) and Inuktitut (Latin, Canada)

Also, I guess an enum itself does not make sense. A CultureInfo is much more than just a name, and a lookup offers more flexibility and independence from any political changes, of which there are many more than we usually realize.

Answer 4

They do change, albeit slowly. In any case, they predate C#, so making them into an enum at this point would be kludgery. Like making POSIX system calls into an enum, which I did in postForth, but knew it was wrong when I did it.