(Message outgoing:637)
Subject:  Re: ANNOUNCE: Tcl 7.5b1 and Tk4.1b1 releases

From:     John Robert LoVerso <loverso@osf.org>
Date:     Tue, 06 Feb 96 14:50:50 -0500
To:       Jabob.Levy@eng.sun.com (Jacob Levy),
	  Brent Welch <brent.welch@eng.sun.com>, John.Ousterhout@eng.sun.com

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You can imagine my surprise when the man page for fconfigure hinted that
-translate can handle NUL characters:

       -translation mode
	     In  Tcl  scripts  the  end  of  a  line  is  always
	     represented  using  a single newline character (\0.

it turns out to be an error in the roff source:

	single newline character (\e\n).
				    ^ extra slash


> John forgot to mention that the socket command was initially prototyped by
> Brent Welch (brent.welch@eng.sun.com) and Brent also made some performance

Here is my list of problems with the socket command, in contrast to how it
works in TclX7.4:

-- It always binds server sockets to a localhost name.
   This certainly breaks on multi-homed hosts, as well as preventing me
   from testing the service via a connection to "localhost".

-- I can't tell it to bind to a random local port when creating a server
   socket.

-- It doesn't provide an interface for allocating a "reserved local port"
   (I submitted code to Neosoft to implement this; it was added to one of
   the patchlevels of TclX7.4)

-- It doesn't provide the ability to get the port number of a connected peer
   ala TclX "fstat $fid remotehost".

   One advantage: the new connection command upcall doesn't force a reverse
		  DNS lookup (like the remotehost option does)

-- Similarly, it doesn't provide a similar mechanism to "fstat $fid localhost".
   While this isn't truly necessary for sockets created inside of Tcl, it means
   I can't tell anything about inherited file descriptors.

   In the past, I've been able to run TclX scripts from inetd and find out
   who is talking to me via these fstat options.  It is unclear if/how the
   new file I/O mechanism will handle this (i.e., if stdin is really a socket!)

-- "info hostname" is somewhat alien to the "info" command, which otherwise
   only returns information about the Tcl interpreter.

-- No hook to gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr() ala TclX "server_info"
   (which I think is a horrible way to do this, but...)

	tcl>server_info official_name 127.1
	localhost
	tcl>server_info official_name localhost
	localhost.osf.org

Finally, as for fconfigure:

-- Perhaps provide an "fconfigure -translation none", so as to be somewhat
   compatible with previous semantics and/or provide a "fast path" that
   avoids scanning the data during the "read" command (but not "gets").

John

(Message outgoing:637)