"Christopher Kohlhoff" <chris@kohlhoff.com> wrote in message news:20051212114532.54650.qmail@web32604.mail.mud.yahoo.com...
Hi Eugene,
--- Eugene Alterman <eugalt@verizon.net> wrote: <snip>
The bottom line of my suggestion is to have 2 distinct interfaces. One is for stream establishment and connection properties management. It provides efficient protocol stack layer navigation and access (but no stream i/o operations). The other one is strictly layered streaming interface for data transfer.
Do you think it makes sense?
Could you sketch out some rough code illustrating what you are thinking of? I'm having trouble seeing how it would fit together, in particular how you would transition from one interface the other.
Hi Chris, I will call this interfaces core_socket and stream_socket respectively. You always start with an object of a stream_socket class and then obtain a reference to core_socket from it. Let us first start with a design that does not change the current interface of stream_socket. Define a new core_socket class template, and derive stream_socket from it adding the stream functionality. Then we can define lowest_layer_type as core_socket. This will solve the stream layering problem since having a reference to core_socket of a lower layer would not allow performing stream operations on it. The next step would be to derive stream_socket privately from core_socket and provide a public member function returning a reference to core_socket. This would deal with any temptation to downcast a core_socket reference to stream_socket. I hope I made myself clear now, Eugene.