Re: sockets

[Paul Kienzle]

On May 14, 2007, at 8:25 PM, Tom Holroyd wrote:

> I finally added the sockets package to the octave-forge CVS (in 
> main/sockets).
>
> This allows only fairly rudimentary socket support at the moment.
> You can send byte strings back and forth.
>
> The testing code uses num2str and so on, and there are some routines 
> for serializing a matrix; the recent changes to int8() allowing 
> strings would make that even easier. Eventually it should be changed 
> to handle more types natively.


listen/send in sockets will conflict with listen/send in miscellaneous.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one using it, but changing will mean user 
retraining.  I'll ask on octave-help.

You may want to make send/recv reliable --- from my reading of the man 
pages the functions can stop before all the requested bytes are read.

In general I prefer a higher level interfaces (e.g., Tcl) which hides 
the complexity of dealing with operating systems rather than a low 
level interface (e.g., Python).  This is especially bad when different 
operating systems provide different interfaces, and the scripting 
language blindly projects them into the scripts, making the developer 
test for specific systems in their code.

- Paul