Re: sockets

[John Swensen]

Paul Kienzle wrote:
> 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
I didn't realize there were existing methods for socket communications.  
After looking at them, they seem more like they should have an "rpc_" 
prefix or something like that.  I made these functions act as closely to 
the POSIX version of the functions as possible.  I should extend them by 
making a socket_server and socket_client in m-files on top of them, but 
still think the lower level should be left intact for those with other 
needs.  I also plan on modifying send/recv to handle different 
datatypes, including structures.

I can, however, easily put a "socket_" prefix on all the functions in 
the socket package if you want me to.  Just let me know what the 
consensus is.

John Swensen