Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!milton!mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU
From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: sockets vs. streams
Message-ID: <6964@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 90 20:22:58 GMT
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: Mendou Zaibatsu, Tomobiki-Cho, Butsumetsu-Shi
Lines: 27


If "network I/O looks like local device I/O" under Unix then when the
h*ll do I have to worry about all the socket or streams crap?

If I want to connect to port 0.143 on host 128.95.112.69, why can't I
do something like
  open ("/tcp/128.95.112.69-0.143",O_RDWR|O_CREAT,0);
(O_RDWR for bidirectional and O_CREAT to mean an active connection
instead of a listening connection)???

Or better yet, fopen() and all the other stdio calls.

/dev/tcp instead of /tcp would have been OK too if you insist.  I
don't care about the internal operating system semantics, as long as a
filesystem interface is presented.

There seems to be a religion that for some reason it is evil for TCP
to use filesystem I/O calls, although the proponents of this religion
have never given me a good reason why.

 _____   | ____ ___|___   /__ Mark ("Gaijin") Crispin  "Gaijin! Gaijin!"
 _|_|_  -|- ||   __|__   /  / R90/6 pilot, DoD #0105   "Gaijin ha doko?"
|_|_|_|  |\-++-  |===|  /  /  Atheist & Proud          "Niichan ha gaijin."
 --|--  /| ||||  |___|    /\  (206) 842-2385/543-5762  "Chigau.  Gaijin ja nai.
  /|\    | |/\| _______  /  \ MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU    Omae ha gaijin darou"
 / | \   | |__|  /   \  /    \"Iie, boku ha nihonjin." "Souka. Yappari gaijin!"
Hee, dakedo UNIX nanka wo tsukatte, umaku ikanaku temo shiranai yo.