A study of portability problems and evaluation

The portability aspects of the FORTRAN and C languages are discussed and the results of porting evaluation are reported. Several experiments were carried out on transferring a fourth-generation language system named STYLE. STYLE was developed for business transaction processing and is designed to greatly speed up application program development. This system is based on the client and server model. Its client program and server program, which communicate with each other over a network, have been transferred to various machines (Unix, OS/2-based). The results of a study of the portability problems are shown. Attention is paid to programming languages, operating systems, interprocess communication mechanisms, file systems, and machine architecture. The results of the difference between the portabilities of FORTRAN modules and C modules and how the portability was affected by a conversion from FORTRAN to C are discussed. The author also introduces an improvement of the porting method which is available in a computer network