Sockets

[Ralph Becket]

Hi Tom,

> I wrote Quintus's library(tcp). And I agree with you that it is "dodgy"
> -- except I would have used the word "squirly".

No offence intended!  I did end up pulling out more of my dwindling
hair reserves trying to port our (SRI's) OAA agent library to SICStus
(we have clients that are exclusively SICStus types).

I'd like to port OAA to Mercury, but ain't no sockets there yet that I
know of.

> One of the things it did wrong is it rolled up too much functionality in
> one package. There should have been a bare-bones interface to sockets, a
> package relating to time manipulation, another for binary representation
> of terms, and another for scheduling.

It's a common problem with first cuts: the desire to implement cool
functionality can easily override the drive to write highly modular
code.

The thing I find most frustrating about the Prolog world is that
every vendor does things differently and (for my money) incompletely.
My language gets really mediaeval trying to port systemsy code from
one Prolog platform to another.  Why of why didn't the standards
committee sort all this out with a decent set of library spec's?

Cheers,

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Becket  |  rwab1 at cam.sri.com  |  http://www.cam.sri.com/people/becket.html