Re: Why no socket package in the standard ?

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 5/24/11 9:17 PM, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:
> Le Tue, 24 May 2011 08:24:40 +0200, georg bauhaus <rmhost.bauhaus@maps.arcor.de> a écrit:
>> Two questions:
>>
>> Which modern, post 1990, language supports sockets in the language?
> As pointed by others in this thread (with reference and examples) as well as pointed in the opening message, the answer is : near to all well known languages.

It says "hard to find a modern language that doesn't support
the Sockets API".  Ada does support the sockets API, of course,
just like the others do. Pretty much the same way in all
bindings.

Let's see the well known "modern" languages of post 1990.

Java, C#.

Well, maybe the P* scripting languages, though these
have roots/version inthe late 1980s.

Will sockets APIs help with JVM or .NET? On the contrary:

Ada -> JVM gives you the best sockets for the platform
directly, *not* by having it added to the Ada standard,
but by simply offering the JVM/.NET classes.
Which aren't BSD style.

> Although optional, even a so much few famous language as SML,

ML. A language that got started in the 1970s.
SML, being written in SML and C, got a binding to BSD internet
sockets. A fairly thin interface if you look close.


I mentioned extended attributes and no standardization at all
because in this case

1) standardization work need not refer to any implementation;
    it can stay purely abstract.
2) virtually all standard file systems support EAs
3) virtually all archive formats support EAs
4) many programs make assumptions about EAs of files
    (such as the type of a file's contents) but lack
    Ada style explicitness.

That' another standard that should live outside language
definitions.

While fewer modern OSs have support BSD sockets (remember,
TCP/IP was an add-on to OS/2 and Windows, and to larger
IBM computers, I believe), I thought that

- if Ada was to standardize a binding, then that's new.
   Something standard that is not about an abstraction,  but
   rather about including some historic incident like BSD
   sockets, in the language description.

- it seems completely sufficient to agree, outside the standard,
   on an API that can be used with any Ada compiler.  No
   standardization  is needed at all.

- Wait. We *do* have Ada Posix binding with an ISO number; since
   Posix sockets do the trick, there is no need to add them to Ada.