Programmability Case

Programmability

Windows and UNIX are major operating systems found in many of today’s Information Technology environments across the world. Each system has their strengths and weaknesses, but both systems are quite capable of providing the necessary foundation for accomplishing required tasks. As stated by Das, “The UNIX operating system marks a strong departure from tradition. It has practically everything an operating system should have, but it also introduces a number of concepts previously unknown to the computing community (p 5).” When Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie developed UNIX while they were at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, their concept for an operating system (OS) was unique because they wanted an operating system to be “programmer friendly” and constructed differently from other machine language based operating systems that were contemporary. There are three main aspects that make UNIX an ideal operating system for programming:

• UNIX was designed and written with the C programming language.

• UNIX was the first operating system to have dual construction consisting of a shell and kernel.

• UNIX has the ability to handle multiple processes

Currently, the Windows operating system has embraced C or more correctly C++ as a part of the core operating system code, but there are some slight differences between the two C coding platforms. C programming focuses on steps and procedures while C++ works more closely with data. C is also considered to be a lower level language than C++. Because of C application language’s closest to the machine level code make operations faster to execute while having the natural language appeal for it commands which are often found in 4th generation programming languages.

Because the core programming for UNIX is C based, UNIX offers several advantages not found in most operating system like the availability to run on nearly all of the top hardware vendors which allows developed code to operate on several difference systems without major changes to the base developed code. Windows shares some of this ability because of its C/C++ roots, but does not share the same range of hardware as UNIX. The next aspect that moved UNIX to being a premier operating system was the fact that the operating system possesses an interpreting command shell and a processing kernel. Current versions of Windows also share a similar shell and kernel construction.

For Windows server operating systems from version 2003 and later, the kernel mode is a highly privileged mode of operation in which the program