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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!mcvax!ukc!cheviot!santosh
From: santosh@cheviot.uucp (Santosh Shrivastava)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.lan
Subject: Re: STREAMS query
Message-ID: <449@cheviot.uucp>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 09:43:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: cheviot.449
Posted: Thu Oct  3 09:43:31 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Oct-85 07:32:01 EDT
References: <471@enmasse.UUCP> <1699@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Reply-To: santosh@cheviot.UUCP (Santosh Shrivastava)
Distribution: net
Organization: U. of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.
Lines: 23
Keywords: connection oriented, connectionless messages
Xref: watmath net.unix-wizards:15087 net.lan:1057
Summary: What about datagrams?

In article <1699@brl-tgr.ARPA> gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) writes:
>> A while ago, I saw some trade press announcements about AT&T providing
>> a "streams" interface for networking sometime early '86.  More recently
>> I've seen press about a working network file system (distinct from NFS)
>> using "streams".
>> 
>> My question is -- what are they?  Can anyone direct me to accurate
>> descriptions of interfaces, functionality, etc.?  (Are they out yet?)
>> I've seen the October 1984 BSTJ, with an article by Dennis Ritchie about
>> them (focused on terminal operations).  Do they provide the same
>> functionality that Berkeley sockets do?  Is there any hot gossip?
>
>So read the article!
>
>Streams are different from sockets and more generally useful.
>

Streams imply connections! There are many applications that can be
adeqately handeled by connectionless datagrams. I reckon there will always
be a need for interfaces supporting both streams and datagrams, and
in this respect Berkeley sockets are superior. Streams are good mainly
for terminal handling (as in V8) but to base your entire networking
on them is surely a bad idea.


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