Design principles of the PORT library

Authors:
Phyllis Fox
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGNUM Conference on the Programming Environment for Development of Numerical Software
Year:
1978

Citing 2
Cited 1

The PORT Mathematical Subroutine Library

ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)
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ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)

Language design and analyzability: a retrospective

Software—Practice & Experience

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Abstract

The Bell Laboratories Mathematical Subroutine Library, PORT, has been under development at Bell Laboratories for the past few years. The design of PORT stemmed from the basic principles of portability and ease of use. The attributes and mechanisms used in the library to support this philosophy include the use of a portable subset of Fortran, and the use of (machine-dependent) functions to supply the necessary environment parameters. Abbreviated calling sequences are made possible by a simplified error-handling technique, and by the use of a portable stack allocator for temporary workspace. Our experience to date with these approaches, and our plans for the future are reviewed here.