PACT user's guide
Stewart A. Brown, D. Braddy · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1993
In a computing landscape which has many different hardware architectures and supporting software systems ranging from compilers to operating systems, there is an obvious and strong need for a philosophy of software development that lends itself to the design and construction of portable code systems. The current efforts to standardize software bear witness to this need. PACT is an effort to implement a software development environment which is itself portable and promotes the design and construction of portable applications. PACT does not include such important tools as editors and compilers. Well built tools of that kind are readily available across virtually all computer platforms. The areas that PACT addresses are at a higher level involving issues such as data portability, portable inter-process communication, and graphics. In its current conception, PACT is a set of 10 tools. Nine of these are implemented as libraries, and two of them provide both libraries and executable applications. PACT is entirely coded in C but was designed with a view toward support of other languages, notably FORTRAN.