by [Theo Verelst]

When I first was using tcl/tk to make a user interface for a suite of radiosity / ray-tracing graphics programs and simulation programs, it didn't have sockets built in yet.

So I made a little stub, on Hewlett Packard Unix, a little program I'd hook into a piped exec, which would transfer the stdin and stdout to a tcl file descriptor and the little C based program would connect to either another stub or another program via what I then called the 'connection server' (of which the code might even be lost due to dreadfull university ongoings), which would join sockets (the actual ones, by passing file descriptors) based on name-based rendez-vous.

The other program could be a C program or a existing application, such as applications allowing external control over a socket (pipe) based connection (like AVS, that was about a decade ago).