APIs for the Ice run time, apart from a small number of language-specific calls that cannot be expressed in Ice, are defined in the
Ice module. In other words, most of the Ice API is actually expressed as Slice definitions. The advantage of doing this is that a single Slice definition is sufficient to define the API for the Ice run time for all supported languages. The respective language mapping rules then determine the exact shape of each Ice API for each implementation language.
We will incrementally explore the contents of the Ice module throughout the remainder of this book.
