Re: [tae] The internet architecture

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
>>
>>
>> Wouldn't it have been nice if the de facto APIs in use today were more
>> along the lines of ConnectTo(DNS name, service/port).
> 
> This certainly seems to be the way that "modern" APIs are heading. If
> I'm not mistaken, Java, PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python and most other scripting
> languages have a socket-like API that does not expose IP addresses, but
> rather connects directly to DNS names. 

and yet, people wonder why so many network applications are still
written in C, despite all of the security issues associated with weak
typing, explicit memory management, and lack of bounds checking on array
references.

(people also need to realize that using a "modern" API makes it _harder_
to get an application to work well in a mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment.)

> Thus, we're well on
> our way towards the goal of making (some) application oblivious to
> addresses. 

and we're also well on our way towards the goal of having everything run
over HTTP.

> I suspect that one reason for the popularity of these languages is
> exactly that programmers don't want to bother remembering when to
> use ntohs().

probably so.  I can't exactly blame them for that.

Keith

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