9 GKS standards

GKS is an international standard and yet several “versions” exist. This section is intended to clear up any confusion that may exist.

During the development of the standard, GKS evolved a great deal. Each revision of the standard document was allocated a number and versions of the draft standard are referred to by these numbers. These documents are drafts; there is only one GKS standard; the document finally adopted by ISO as an international standard.

The first draft that is of more than historical interest is version 6.2, because this version was implemented by the Technische Hochshule Darmstadt and obtained at an early date by Starlink. At that time there was no draft FORTRAN binding (the subroutine names and argument lists) and the names were invented by Darmstadt.

The RAL/ICL GKS is an implementation of the 7.4 draft is the version adopted as an ISO standard