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Interface
Florian Cramer
It seems as if the term "interface" is borrowed from
chemistry where it means "a surface forming a common boundary of
two bodies, spaces, phases".1 In computing,
interfaces link software and hardware in relation to each other and
to their human users. So they can be
(a) hardware that connects users to hardware; typically
input/output devices such as keyboards, and feedback devices such as
screens or loudspeakers
(b) hardware that connects hardware to hardware; network
interconnection points and bus systems for example.
(c) software, or hardware-embedded logic, that connects
hardware to software; the instruction set of a processor, for
example, or device drivers.
(d) specifications and protocols between software and software;
i.e. "application programming interfaces" (APIs)
(e) symbolic handles which, in conjunction with (a), makes
software accessible to users; i.e. "user interfaces", often
mistaken in media studies for "interface" as a whole.
In a software studies context, only the three (c), (d) and (e)
are of relevance.
Regarding (c), any piece of software is an interface to
hardware. Computer programs could be seen as tactical constraints of
the total possible uses of hardware. They constrain, for example, the
combination of a CPU, RAM, hard disk, mainboard, video card, mouse,
keyboard and screen with its abundant possible system states to the
function of a word processor, a calculator, a video editor etc.. In
other words, they interface to the universal machine by behaving as a
specialized machine, breaking the former down to a subset of itself.
This operation is linguistic because it reformulates the totality of
available machine instructions into a new control -> language.
This language acts as an "abstraction layer". It is either
a subset of the total available instructions when it is Turing
incomplete, or a redressing of them with different symbolic handles
when it is Turing complete.
"User interface" and "programming
interface" have not always differed. They used to be identical
in many operating systems up to 8-bit home computers in the 1980s
that booted into a BASIC programming language prompt, or MIT's
Lisp machines which had a Lips programming environment as their user
interface. Character-based shells such as the DOS and Unix shells can
be used both as programming and user interfaces. The same as true
even for graphical user interfaces when they are scriptable. But even
if they aren't, they still act, as a matter of fact, as
specialized symbolic computer control languages. The distinction of a
"user interface", an "API" and a computer control
language is purely arbitrary. It's just a nomenclature that more
complex interfaces to computer functions tend to be called
"programming languages" and less complex ones "user
interfaces". Since the usage interface to a computer program is
always symbolic, and involves syntax and symbolic representations for
operations, it always boils down to being a formal language.
Everything that can be said about software interfaces is therefore
redundant vis-à-vis the entry on -> language.
Fußnoten
1According to Webster's Ninth
Collegiate Dictionary which dates the term to 1882