Sharing a socket connection

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

We are working on a system where a number of Ada tasks are going to
share a single socket connection to a server [1].

The socket connection is bidirectional with requests sent from a client
followed by corresponding responses from the server.  Each client should
only get responses to its own requests.

Our current approach is to encapsulate the socket in a package, and use
a mutex [2] to lock the socket during an entire
send-request-get-response operation.

Greetings,

Jacob

[1] The rationale for this is that the individual tasks only are
    expected to use the server sporadically, and that letting each task
    have its own connection may use too many limited resources on the
    server.

[2] Do the standard libraries include a mutex (I have a vague
    recollection of having seen one, but can't find it), or should we
    just implement it ourselves (or use the one in "Simple components
    for Ada").

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