On 20 Jan 2017, at 19:38, Nemo <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:

As they say, 'ave a laugh, guv:
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43781

You have not understood the problem I was describing I think: things like POSIX or LSB do not solve it: if they did it would be trivial to port <awful mass of scripts> between platforms, and it is not, because <awful mass of scripts> will always rely on behaviour which is outwith the standard, whatever the standard may be. These standards solve the problem of making well-written code portable, but your bank is not held together by well-written code, unfortunately.

An interesting approach would be platforms which only supported the standard they purport to conform to (ie there would be no additional functionality at all): such platforms would make porting things more easy, but they would also be mostly indistinguishable from each other and thus eliminate most of the competition between vendors. They would also be impossibly austere of course.