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Asri-unix.1170 net.works utzoo!decvax!cca!sri-unix!REM@MIT-MC Tue Apr 6 20:54:53 1982 Re: WORKS Digest V2 #37 From: Robert Elton Maas <REM AT MIT-MC> It shouldn't be too hard to add an extra level of software at the point where the user program itself interfaces to UNIX. Having done so, for example having all OPENs of files/pipes go thru a single user-written procedure, which is moved to a separate source file and shared among all user programs that are written in the same source language, it should then be possible to modify the interface source file to run on a non-unix system, at which point all those user programs should work without significant modifications on the other system. Thus systems needn't be standardized to have UNIX as their user-program/system interface, in order to acquire the UNIX application-program "library". (Quotes around "library" because I don't mean library in the usual computer-jargon sense of a "library of assembly-language subroutines editable by FUDGE2".)

To some extent, SAIL and LISP already do this sort of thing, as does PCNET software.

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