Page initiated by [Theo Verelst]

As in that there are 3 major characterisation parameters for just about any computer design and setup:

   * computation
the actual things being computed, the number crunching, the bit fidling, the float stuff, the graphics blits, some data goes in, a piece of machinery does something to it, and the result comes out of the computation
   * storage
without it, we'd only have functions, which have no state, and nowhere to prepare the input data or store results, or cut and paste with or make a database
   * communication
the connections between units with either of the computation or storage behaviour, transparent in the sense that data passes by unchanged, no actual computations take place.

I coined these while working at university once, in discussiona with people who were supposed to go deeply and theoretically into parallel computing on a good day when I tought about correcting their lack of views instead of uttering my annoyance with their blatant lack of actual computer knowledge. 

And in fact, they are well choosen, probably trivial for some, but thinking along their lines is not. Lets see what this means for using Tcl and Tk.

Quantizing is in:

   * Computation power: MIPS/Flops, specmarks, etc
   * Storage capacity: bits/bytes
   * Communication speed, called ''bandwidth'' in bits/sec or Bytes/S

Today I though I'd sit down and hand-benchmark sockets on redhat 9.0 and maybe on XP on a modern PC, see what they can do. Sockets are the essential link in X, and the only decent real time communication method between applications apart maybe from shared memory. The internet uses them (tcp/ip osi stack level 5 or so: application layer), and at least all os-es have some form of them.

starting a fresh wish or tclsh, or wish-with-console (I prefer to work that way and save my history for finding back real nitty gritty stuff I tried), and than nother, a connection can be set up.

 wish1: socket -server sp 777
 wish2: proc sp {} {}

   wish2 set s [socket localhost 777]