How I wish I could get some documentation on the new socket related commands
in B2!
Diving into to undocumented stacks and trying to figure out what parameters
are passed, and whether all the features are supported on all platforms can
be fun (when all goes well). Today I'm miserable, cos I'm going round in
circles -:)
read from socket <s> [for | until <cond>] [with message <m>]
OK, well it would be nice to find out what the definition and syntax of a
socket <s> was. Answer simple, click on the word socket for the definition,
and <s> for the syntax. But, after a number of days and lot's of very
helpful postings, I still don't know, and what's worse when I do no one else
will, (save the few people who would read the post).
Am I moaning? Not the sort really, so I'm offering my services (not quite a
promiss), to improve on the "Metatalk Reference" stack.
Back to the socket stuff...
1) What is the differnece between a socket and a port? (opensockets()
returns 80 - which is the port I set but I can get lots of sockets opened on
this port, so...? Is this something to do with one of the mysterious
parameters passed to mc after you've issued and "accept..."
mc ref states:
The accept command accepts TCP connections or UDP datagrams from other
systems or processes and creates a new socket that can be used to read or
write to that other process or system. When one arrives, the specified
message is sent with a first parameter that is the IP address of the other
end of the socket. If it is a datagram, a second parameter containing the
actual data is also included.
Well it's not a simple IP address as I know it it's got a "|" and big
number after it. Perhaps this is the elusive socket stuff? Not sure yet...
Now let's look at "stdin"
-------------------
mc ref states:
The read command reads from a file or process specified by the expression
<name>, putting the characters read into the local variable "it". Note that
<name> is case sensitive on all platforms, so you must pass exactly the same
string passed to the open command.
The constant stdin can also be used to read from MetaCard's standard input
on UNIX systems (stdin is opened by default, no need to open it with the
open command).
The result will be set to the string eof when an end-of-file was encountered
during the read, or to an error message if some other error occured. An
empty result indicates a successful read.
---------------------
Well, well... I wonder if "stdin" is case sensitive? And what is the syntax
to read from it? After lot's of experimentation, I got it so mc does not
complain, but does it work on the Mac? If not, I think I have a problem, as
I want to get the form data from a "POST" and that is supposed to go to
"stdin"? I think.
And read from socket...
-------------------
mc ref states:
The "read from socket" command is used to read data from a socket. Sockets
are always opened in binary mode and so any required data conversion must be
done in scripts. If the optional "message" parameter is supplied, a message
will be sent when the read completes, otherwise the read blocks until the
data has been read. If no "for" or "until" condition is supplied, the
message will be sent when any data arrives at the socket.
-------------------
Well as usual any help is appreciated, and I promise to write this up when I
figure it out. Still don't get this UNIX world. Lack of clarity and
documentation seem to be the norm. It's kind of "if you don't know, don't
ask" - present company excluded -:)
