Wherever possible and appropriate, existing library functions were extended to include locale-dependent behavior. These functions came in two groups:
Those declared by the ctype.h header (character classification and conversion), and
Those that convert to and from printable and internal forms of numeric values, such as printf() and strtod().
All ctype.h predicate functions, except isdigit() and isxdigit(), can return nonzero (true) for additional characters when the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale is other than "C". In a Spanish locale, isalpha(’ñ’) should be true. Similarly, the character conversion functions, tolower() and toupper(), should appropriately handle any extra alphabetic characters identified by the isalpha() function. The ctype.h functions are almost always macros that are implemented using table lookups indexed by the character argument. Their behavior is changed by resetting the tables to the new locale’s values, and therefore have no performance impact.
Those functions that write or interpret printable floating values can change to use a decimal-point character other than period (.) when the LC_NUMERIC category of the current locale is other than "C". There is no provision for converting any numeric values to printable form with thousands separator-type characters. When converting from a printable form to an internal form, implementations are allowed to accept such additional forms, again in other than the "C" locale. Those functions that make use of the decimal-point character are the printf() and scanf() families, atof(), and strtod(). Those functions that are allowed implementation-defined extensions are atof(), atoi(), atol(), strtod(), strtol(), strtoul(), and the scanf() family.