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From: zweig@cs.uiuc.edu (Johnny Zweig)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: sockets vs. streams
Message-ID: <1990Sep4.162046.13457@julius.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 4 Sep 90 16:20:46 GMT
References: <6964@milton.u.washington.edu>
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Organization: U of Illinois, Dept. of Computer Science, Systems Research Group
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In my (object-oriented) implementation of TCP, the interface to the TCP
processing module is based on TCP-messages.  You can set/check flags and
numbers and all that kind of crap.  It is somebody else's job to make it look
like a file or whatever.  If you want a file that automagically creates a
network connection when you open it (and what is this /dev/tcp/XXX nonsense
all about? Sheesh! I want a file called "Dad" that opens a connection to the
talk daemon on pop's macintosh when I open it r/w -- this silly business with
IP addresses and port numbers is just as much Someone Else's Problem as making
the whole goddamn mess look like a file).

I think this whole discussion is misguided (though convenient for those of us
who wish to Change the World) in that it makes the assumption that there is
some best way to think about network communications.  This is false.
Networking is complicated (Zweig's Axiom).

The paradigm for thinking about something and the something itself are
different, and if the great minds behind UNIX can't hack that, well, shout at
them (as Mark appears to be doing).  A corrollary to the fact that they are
different is that they should be handled by different pieces of the OS.

-Johnny Paradigm