1 Scope
This Technical Report is based on experience gained in the standardization of two
major areas in information processing. One area covers programming languages. The
other area is composed of the services necessary to an application program to achieve
its goal. The services are divided into coherent groups, each referred to as a SYSTEM
FACILITY, that are accessed through a FUNCTIONAL INTERFACE. The specification of a
system facility, referred to as a FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION, defines a collection of
SYSTEM FUNCTIONS, each of which carries out some well-defined service.
Since in principle there is no reason why a particular system facility should not
be used by a program, regardless of the language in which it is written, it is the
practice of system facility specifiers to define an ‘abstract’ functional interface
that is language independent. In this way, the concepts in a particular system facility
may be refined by experts in that area without regard for language peculiarities.
An internally coherent view of a particular system facility is defined, relating the
system functions to each other in a consistent way and relating the system functions
to other layers within the system facility, including protocols for communication
with other objects in the total system.
However, if these two areas are standardized independently, it is not possible to
guarantee that programs from one operating environment can be moved to another, even
if the programs are written in a standard programming language and use only standard
system facilities. A language binding of a system facility to a programming language
provides language syntax that maps the system facility’s fun...