Carbon (API)

Carbon is Apple Inc.'s procedural API for the Macintosh operating system, which permits a good degree of forward and backward compatibility between source code written to run on the older and now dated Classic Mac OS (Version 8.1 and later), and the newer Mac OS X. It is one of five APIs natively available for Mac OS X; the others are Cocoa, POSIX, Toolbox (for the obsolete Classic environment), and Java. Carbon is not fully compatible with 64-bit programs under Mac OS 10.5.