Rosepack Document 1: Guidelines for Writing Semi-portable Fortran

Transferring Fortran subroutines from one manufacturer's machine to another or from one operating system to another puts certain constrains on the construction of the Fortran statements that are used in the subroutines. The reliable performance of this mathematical software should be unaffected by the host environment in which the software is used or by the compiler from which the code is generated. In short, the algorithm is to he independent of the computing environment in which it is run. The subroutines of ROSEPACK (Robust Statistics Estimation Package) are Fortran IV source code designed to be semi-portable where semi-portable is defined to mean transportable with minimum change.*