4 Addresses

The fragment commaddress supports representing addresses of communication ports with which one might like to establish connections. In this setting, more different operating systems and kinds of communication ports are covered than what is actually supported in BasicSocket yet. Accordingly, TCP/IP sockets are just one example of a kind of communication port, though a very important one.

Instances of any of these patterns are values, and under normal circumstances their identity will make no difference. This ensures that it makes sense to translate them from BETA objects into simple strings of text and back again, and this eases the migration of such values across networks and other media.

At the most abstract level, portableCommAddress models a portable communication address. This specifies the address of a single destination or the address(es) of a group of destinations.

The patterns portableMultiAddress and portablePortAddress specialize portableCommAddress into concrete patterns for the multiple-destination case and one-destination case, respectively.

The pattern concretePortAddress and its specializations represent non-portable, protocol specific communication port addresses. Of course, any concretePortAddress is portable, being a normal BETA object; but only on some platforms will it be possible to have such a communication port as is specified by the concretePortAddress.

ConcretePortAddresses are kept in portableCommAddresses and selected according to protocol specifications, given as protocolSpec objects.


Process Libraries - Reference Manual
© 1994-2004 Mjølner Informatics
[Modified: Friday October 20th 2000 at 14:22]