socket, pipe

[eieio@coastalnet.com (ghostie)]

I'm quite the Ada newbie.  I'm really a C++ programmer.  But I've been
tasked with making a change to an Ada application that we have, and
would appreciate some help getting started.  Please be patient.

We want our Ada application, while running, to share a lot of binary
information with a different application, this one written in Matlab. 
Each applicaton will produce output data which will be used by the
other application. Both applications will run on Win2K PCs, and they
may or may not be on the same computer.

Is this possible?  What would be the best way to do it?  I've tried
looking up some information but to be honest, I don't understand the
difference between pipes and sockets and Overlapped I/O and whatever
else is available, let alone if it is possible to do these things in
Ada.  All the information I'm finding is either Unix-oriented, or else
it assumes a moderate level of knowledge (which I don't have).
My Ada compiler is DACS 4.7.15d.

TIA