CompuServe Messages

I am no longer involved in such portable code development, but the only real step we took was to make sure we used only FORTRAN-66 standard. When implementing Fortran and Cobol compilers for a particular hardware the vendor of the compiler should provide a way of checking the code for adherence to such published standards. For example, there is a Fortran 66 standard, and I think a Fortran 77 standard developed by some software standards committee (I forget the name of the organization). So when you compile your program, and there is a legal statement for a particular implementation, but it isn't one of the standard statements, an error codes is generated. Of course, sometimes you are faced with restrictions when you do this type of code development. Most graphics ideas are out because writing software for an IBM 3270 series terminals, graphics are very limited in the lesser expensive models. So we would just display text on the screen. Taking advantage of terminals capabilities would also have to be limited, because the lowest common denominator of terminal would have to become the standard of implementation. Of course, I wasn't involved in the upper level planning of the software porting. A big answer for our problems was using the Oracle database which was responsible for most of our software needs anyways, and porting Oracle is extremely easily because it existed on all three platforms already. Now with C, there are so few statements which are really part of the language anyways, then you have to be careful concerning how each subroutine is implemented on each platform. Hope this helps a little.