Re: open socket with listen() and still have command line available?

[Paul Kienzle]

On May 24, 2007, at 6:50 PM, Brian W. wrote:

> Paul,
> from reading several of your posts on the listen function it seems 
> that you are kind of fixated on your TCL stuff. Because there are many 
> more uses of octave besides embedding in TCL, your short answer could 
> have been "you are right, listen is useless unless you want to have 
> reduced octave functionality".

I tried to explain why your request is unreasonable.
Apparently I did so a little too succinctly.

If you set up a listening socket to octave which
forks whenever it receives a connection, the forked
child processes will operate in their own namespace
and will not see anything you do in the parent
process.  Keeping control of the parent console
does not AFAIK give you power to query any of the
children.  Hence my answer: there is no benefit to
keeping control of the listening console.

I suggested you could probably program a single
octave interpreter which could receive commands
from multiple connections simultaneously.  I do
not see a benefit to doing so.

I wrote listen to make an enhanced version of
Octave: one which I could write powerful GUI
applications and talk to across the net so that
I didn't have to deal with the problem of deploying
expensive numerical routines on the instrument
control computers.  I happened to do so in Tcl/Tk.
There are other wrappers for Python and Java
but their authors chose not to donate them.

You are welcome to write wrappers in the language
of your choice, including octave, and donate them
to octave-forge, or enhance or rewrite the listen
function.  I recommend doing so at a higher
level than the POSIX socket interface.

You are not welcome to denigrate my work, or that
of anybody else who gives freely of their time
to politely try to help you, even if you do not
understand the answers they give.

- Paul