Programming conventions

Rim is written entirely in fortran 77. Of its few hundred subroutines, only 20 are `system dependent' and have to be edited or rewritten for each operating system. A list of these appears in table [*]. The others should compile without modification. All source is upper case and has a maximum record length of 72 columns.

Common blocks and system parameters are included in subroutines via `include' statements, having the form  <"INCLUDE '"<FILENAME>.DCK"'" & on the VAX/VMS version, and
"INCLUDE ("<FILENAME>")" & on the IBM/CMS version, and
"INCLUDE '"<filename>.d"'" & on the UNIX version. so there is an inherent system dependency. However, include statements always begin in column 7 and the included file never includes another file.

Rim has a long history and was worked on by many programmers over a period of many years—there is, alas, little uniformity in style among the subroutines. There are also no variable naming conventions—except that parameters nearly always begin with `Z' and variables do not.



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