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Operating Systems and Computer Languages

FIT2D was originally developed on a VAX running VMS, but was later been ported Sun and HP versions of Unix[*], and now runs equally on all common versions of Unix (Dec-OSF1/Dec-Unix, Dec-Ultrix, HPUX-9, HPUX-10, IBM AIX4, Linux, Silicon Graphics IRIX5.3, Silicon Graphics IRIX6.2 SunOS4, SunOS5.4/Solaris).

The vast majority of the code is written in Fortran-77 (plus the MIL-STD-1753 extensions), and is highly portable from one system to another. (As its written in Fortran the frequency of bugs is smaller than a correspondingly sized "C" program as pointers are much less necessary, and run-time array bound checking allows most of the worst bugs to be trapped before they do any harm.) A small amount of code is written in ANSI-C for interfacing to certain POSIX system calls and the X-11 library.

FIT2D is not in any sense Unix dependent (as a good program should not be operating system dependent), however they are to a limited extent POSIX 1003.1 dependent (POSIX 1003.1 being an international standard). As such running the programs on any system which is POSIX compliant should not be a problem. An OpenVMS version would be possible, but so far there has not been sufficient interest. A port to Windows NT will start soon, but this is a more involved task since, whilst POSIX 1003.1 is supported, the X-11 graphics library is not so a graphics driver will need to be written for OpenGL.


next up previous contents index
Next: Documentation Up: Appendix A: FIT2D Availability Previous: Availability

Andy Hammersley
8/26/1998