On 12/5/08 10:18 AM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc2@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > It's possible that this represents insight worth sharing broadly, I doubt that very much, since it's really about API design and ideological purity and I think has had only a negligible impact on deployability, but > It isn't immediately obvious to me why file descriptors would have had a major > impact, so can you elaborate? I don't think they have. "Unix" (whatever that means for the purpose of discussion) was designed around a few abstractions, like pipes, filedescriptors, and processes, and by the time IP was implemented we'd pretty much settled on filedescriptors as endpoints for communications. We could do things with them like i/o redirection, etc., and sockets are something else entirely. That is to say, in Unix we shouldn't care whether an input or output stream is a terminal, a file, or a network data stream, but because of sockets we do have to care. Melinda _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf