The ARM7's have a 32 pin wide port and have separate set and clear peripheral register, so if you wanted to set pins 0 to 7 with 0x03, you would have to clear all those pins first CLR_PORTA_REGISTER = 0x00FF, then set what you wanted, SET_PORTA_REGISTER = 0x0003.
It's a little confusing, because in order to clear a pin, you have to write a 1 to it's associated bit in the clear register.
With a port that's 32 pins wide, you don't need to fiddle around, if some of the pins you have are on one port or another, unless your running a 100pin chip, they are likely all to be on one PORT.
EDIT: I'd say I was ninja posted, but 9 minutes between post times, I guess I just had this page sitting here for a while.