> > Wouldn't a heuristic be enough here? if the host specified is the localhost > then forst try to attach to a Unix domain socket, if that fails then try > an IN connection to the localhost instead, the port number would become > the socket's path.
this would lead to nondeterministic behavior. suppose you want to talk to an authentication service and you expect one to be running on the local machine. this could lead to some unpleasant suprises. i would think that using local instead of tcp would be much preferable. - erik
