Portability Guidelines

Refer to these guidelines to develop business functions that comply with portability standards:

• Business functions must be ANSI-compatible for portability.

  Since different computer platforms might present limitations, exceptions to this rule do exist. However, do not use a non-ANSI exception without approval from the Business Function Standards Committee.

• Do not create a program that depends on data alignment, because each system aligns data differently by allocating bytes or words.

  For example: for a one-character field that is one byte. Some systems allocate only one byte for that field, while other systems allocate the entire word for the field.

• Keep in mind that vendor libraries and function calls are system-dependent and exclusive to that vendor.

  This means that if the program is compiled using a different compiler, that particular function will fail.

• Use caution when using pointer arithmetic because it is system-dependent and is based on the data alignment.

• Do not assume that all systems will initialize a variable the same way.

  Always explicitly initialize variables.

• Use caution when using an offset to explicitly retrieve a value within the data structure.

  This guideline also relates to data alignment. Use offset to define cache index.

• Always typecast if your parameter does not match the function parameter.

  Note:

  JCHAR szArray[13] is not the same as (JCHAR *) in the function declaration. Therefore, typecast of (JCHAR *) is required for szArray for that particular function.

• Never typecast on the left-hand side of the assignment statement, as it can result in a loss of data.

  For example, in the statement (short)nValue = (long),lValue will lose the value of the long integer if it is too large to fit into a short integer data type.

• Do not use C++ comments (C++ comments begin with two forward slashes).