Hi David--
Further background: It seems to me that there should be no real conceptual difference between an IO channel to a file, and an IO channel to a socket, or to any other external IO channel which can be opened, closed, read, or written to. Presumably these should all look like streams, and presumably we would want socket streams, file streams, and any other streams on external IO channels to behave in similar ways.
I agree; I've written a framework which includes support for streaming over any external resource (e.g., TCP and UDP sockets, serial ports, files, MIDI ports, etc.). A single small message interface applies.
It's not finished yet (not plugin-ized yet, primitives for just win32 so far), but I think the message and primitive interfaces are interesting on their own.
Further information is at http://netjam.org/correspondents.
-C
-- Craig Latta composer and computer scientist craig.latta@netjam.org www.netjam.org latta@interval.com Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]