                       Sather Program Run-time Facilities
                       ----------------------------------

     This part of the required library is defined solely for interfacing with an underlying operating system - if one is in use - or a 'bare' low-level set of routines for handling an embedded program.

     The different variants provided here are for quite different systems which offer facilities in different ways.  The purpose here is to minimise any code necessary in providing the special interfaces.

     Most variants of unix (including linux) which are Posix compliant may safely use the unix variant.

     There is no support for 'vanilla' MS-DOS or Windows 3.x variants of PC operating systems.  The interface defined under Win-32 should be succesful when used with Windows NT and Windows 9x with little or no adaptation.

     The RISC-OS variant is provided for those machines using RiscOS Ltd (successors to Acorn) operating systems.

     Between them these three illustrate a wide variaty of interface mechanisms which have been found to work and will therefore provide suitable example code for porting the language to some other, quite different, operating system.

                                                           K Hopper
                                                           11 May 99