The Design of an Integrated Support Software System

Abstract

This paper describes some of the interesting features of a large integrated support software system. The system was built to support the development, on an IBM 370, of an extremely large Pascal program to be run on a network of Intel 8086 microprocessors. The Pascal program was composed of over 1500 separately compiled components containing over 1,000,000 lines of source code. About 200 technical people were involved in this activity. In a project of this magnitude, integration issues are of overriding importance. There must be all the type checking and managerial control associated with standard Pascal programs, but the Pascal solution of compiling the whole application as one unit is clearly unacceptable. Various pieces must be separately compiled.