IDL is available on most popular platforms in use today. A great amount of effort has been invested to make use of this inherent portability of IDL to have PaPCo running on a variety of platforms (see section 1.4).
IDL proper runs an many systems without any problems. The limitations in PaPCo come from all the system-dependent I/O that takes place, the use of environmental variables and system spawn calls.
The core of PaPCo has been revised now to replace all system dependent calls
with ``new'' routines. For example, the setnenv call, which sets
environmental variables, has been replaced by a routine papco_setenv,
which resolves any system dependence. All the routines that had to be written
in this manner are collected in the papco_opsys.pro file under
papco_XX/papco and are documented there. The routines in
papco_opsys.pro now support UNIX, VMS and Windows 95.
Note: So far, only PaPCo core has this portability implemented. All existing
modules still need to be updated to make use of the support provided in
papco_opsys.pro. All NEW modules written with this version of PAPCO
should have module portability implemented - however, this is the
responsibility of the module author.