A tool, called
fidl, has been developed which gives the Fortran programmer an easy access to the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). It supplies a Fortran application interface by defining a Fortran-like interface definition language and facilitates the creation of distributed applications by generating the additional code automatically. As a result, the Fortran application programmer does not have to learn much about the DCE RPC system, the programming language C, or the peculiarities between Fortran and C.
The experiences gained in developing fidl have been collected in the first part of the article. These experiences will give general hints how to use DCE RPC from languages other than C.