A project dealt with the description of the computational environment through parameters for use inside numerical software. It resulted in an official IFIP document "Parametrization of the Environment for Transportable Software", edited by Brian Ford, which was simultaneously published in ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Vol. 4, pp. 100-103; SIGNUM Newsletter, Vol. 13 (No. 2), pp. 20-23; SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 13 (No. 7), pp. 27-30; IMA Bulletin, Vol. 14, pp. 179-182; Algol Bulletin No. 42, pp. 7-10; Computer Physics Communications, Vol. 15, pp. 1-3; and other journals (all in 1978). This document provided a first step towards the standardization of names and meanings of such parameters.
Another project was a suggested standard for intrinsic functions permitting access from a program to the floating point number representation in the host computer; the existence of such an access is a prerequisite for transportable numerical software (see the report CSS 76 in the next section). The concepts of the working group have been extended and included in the standard for Fortran 90.
A tutorial on software transportability has been prepared by a subcommittee chaired by Brian Ford. It has been published as "Controversy: Portability - A No Longer Solved Problem" by Stuart Feldman and W. Morven Gentleman, Computing Systems Journal (the journal of the Usenix Association) volume 3, number 2 (Spring 1990), pp. 359-380.
Furthermore, WG 2.5 assisted in the arrangement of the Workshop on Portability of Numerical Software, held at Oak Brook, Illinois, USA, 21-23 June 1976. The proceedings of this working conference have been edited by W. Cowell, they have appeared as Vol. 57 of Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (1977).