Hi Michel,
Is it a problem that the special or specific adresses is represented by different textual representations for different networks? I guess a textual representation could be devised that makes these look the same with some psuedo notation. Like broadcast tcp:/[broadcast]:1234, tcp6:/[broadcast]:1234, local tcp:/[local]:1234, tcp6:/[local]:1234, any tcp:/[any]:1234, tcp6:/[any]:1234 this would i guess alleviate some of the eventual problems.
The pseudo-tokens would work as long as they weren't ambiguous with allowed machine names in that network. I think a simple layer to register network objects (so you don't get them all linked in<g>), plus a fully general text-to-address object mapping would be a reasonable facility. Again, though, I view this as a (good) simplified use case and would still want control over the life-time of these objects (see other posts for the sad story<g>). I do recognize my concerns here are probably not too common, but all this might mean is that an http_get wrapper would be overloaded on url and address_ptr. The former would call the later after a lookup. Best, Don __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com