api's and asm

[badboy28]

hello
i would like to know what a systems API's are? Is that a certain language for the system like C? Also is ASM another language like C? i heard many people talk about this, but never could figure it out.

thanks

[Stoned_Coder]

an API is a group of functions which allow you to accomplish some task or other basically.For instance through the win32 API you can make a functional window, a dialog box, a file-open dialog etc.
There are separate API's for multimedia,networking etc.

All programming languages are converted by compilers,interpretors etc. into machine code.This is just numbers.The processor doesn't understand c/c++ it only understands numbers.Asm is assembly language which is so closely related to machine code it virtually is machine code.The reason for this is that asm is the language of the processor.Again what we type is converted to numbers but this is all done at a much lower level than c/c++ so your app if its written in asm will run faster than if written in c/c++ but it will take you probably about 10 times longer to debug and program.

[Witch_King]

In a professional operating system like Win2k there is the Win32, POSIX, and OS2 API. Other API's are created but require wrappers to any one of these.

The API will protect the operating system and allow it to execute mulitple tasks/processes without conflict. It is a manager of the whole system. There are thousands of published Win32 API calls and a few that are only known to microsoft.