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MIT/GNU Scheme provides access to sockets, which are a mechanism for inter-process communication. TCP stream sockets are supported, which communicate between computers over a TCP/IP network. TCP sockets are supported on all operating systems.
TCP sockets have two distinct interfaces: one interface to implement a client and another to implement a server. The basic protocol is that servers set up a listening port and wait for connections from clients. Implementation of clients is simpler and will be treated first.
The socket procedures accept two special arguments, called
host-name and service. Host-name is a string which
must be the name of an internet host. It is looked up using the
ordinary lookup rules for your computer. For example, if your host is
foo.mit.edu and host-name is "bar", then it
specifies bar.mit.edu.
Service specifies the service to which you will connect. A
networked computer normally provides several different services, such as
telnet or FTP. Each service is associated with a unique
port number; for example, the "www" service is associated
with port 80. The service argument specifies the port
number, either as a string, or directly as an exact non-negative
integer. Port strings are decoded by the operating system using a
table; for example, on unix the table is in /etc/services.
Usually you will use a port string rather than a number.
open-tcp-stream-socket opens a connection to the host specified
by host-name. Host-name is looked up using the ordinary
lookup rules for your computer. The connection is established to the
service specified by service. The returned value is an
I/O port, to which you can read and write characters using
ordinary Scheme I/O procedures such as read-char and
write-char.
When you wish to close the connection, just use close-port.
As an example, here is how you can open a connection to a web server:
(open-tcp-stream-socket "web.mit.edu" "www")
Next we will treat setting up a TCP server, which is slightly more complicated. Creating a server is a two-part process. First, you must open a server socket, which causes the operating system to listen to the network on a port that you specify. Once the server socket is opened, the operating system will allow clients to connect to your computer on that port.
In the second step of the process, you accept the connection, which completes the connection initiated by the client, and allows you to communicate with the client. Accepting a connection does not affect the server socket; it continues to listen for additional client connections. You can have multiple client connections to the same server socket open simultaneously.
This procedure opens a server socket that listens for connections to service; the socket will continue to listen until you close it. The returned value is a server socket object.
An error is signalled if another process is already listening on the
service. Additionally, ports whose number is less than 1024 are
privileged on many operating systems, and cannot be used by
non-privileged processes; if service specifies such a port and you
do not have administrative privileges, an error may be signalled.
The optional argument address specifies the IP address
on which the socket will listen. If this argument is not supplied or is
given as #f, then the socket listens on all IP
addresses for this machine. (This is equivalent to passing the result
of calling host-address-any.)
Checks to see if a client has connected to server-socket. If
so, an I/O port is returned. The returned port can be read
and written using ordinary Scheme I/O procedures such as
read-char and write-char.
The argument block? says what to do if no client has connected at
the time of the call. If #f, it says to return immediately with
two values of #f. Otherwise, the call waits until a client
connects.
The argument peer-address is either #f or an IP
address as allocated by allocate-host-address. If it is an
IP address, the address is modified to be the address of the
client making the connection.
The optional argument line-translation specifies how end-of-line
characters will be translated when reading or writing to the returned
socket. If this is unspecified or #f, then lines will be
terminated by CR-LF, which is the standard for most internet
protocols. Otherwise, it must be a string, which specifies the
line-ending character sequence to use.
Note that closing the port returned by this procedure does not affect
server-socket; it just closes the particular client connection
that was opened by the call. To close server-socket, use
close-tcp-server-socket.
Closes the server socket server-socket. The operating system will cease listening for network connections to that service. Client connections to server-socket that have already been accepted will not be affected.
Next: Miscellaneous OS Facilities, Previous: Subprocesses, Up: Operating-System Interface [Contents][Index]