Sunday, November 6, 2011

Hardware Interaction in C programming language

Primarily interaction with hardware suggests interaction with peripheral devices. However, its reach is not limited to interaction with peripherals. The interaction may also involve communicating with chips present on the motherboard. Thus more correctly, interaction with hardware would mean interaction with any chip other than the microprocessor. During this interaction one or more of the following activities may be performed:

(a) Reacting to events that occur because of user’s interaction with the hardware. For example, if the user presses a key or clicks the mouse button then our program may do something.

(b) Reacting to events that do not need explicit user’s interaction. For example, on ticking of a timer our program may want to do something.

(c) Explicit communication from a program without the occurrence of an event. For example, a program may want to send a character to the printer, or a program may want to read/write the contents of a sector from the hard disk. 

Let us now see how this interaction is done under different platforms

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