Editing Device driver (section)

==Purpose==
The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator between a hardware device and the applications or [[operating system]]s that use it.<ref name="dev1"/> Programmers can write higher-level application code independently of whatever specific hardware the end-user is using.
For example, a high-level application for interacting with a [[serial port]] may simply have two functions for "send data" and "receive data". At a lower level, a device driver implementing these functions would communicate to the particular serial port controller installed on a user's computer. The commands needed to control a [[16550 UART]] are much different from the commands needed to control an [[FTDI]] serial port converter, but each hardware-specific device driver [[Abstraction (computer science)|abstracts]] these details into the same (or similar) software interface.