ECLiPSe contains built-in predicates that support interprocess communications using sockets. Sockets implement bidirectional channels that can connect multiple processes on different machines in different networks. The socket predicates are directly mapped to the system calls and therefore detailed information can be found in the Unix manuals.
Sockets in general allow a networked communication among many processes, where each packet sent by one process can be sent to different address. In order to limit the number of necessary built-in predicates, ECLiPSe supports only point-to-point communication based on stream or datagram sockets, or many-to-one communication based on datagrams. Broadcasting as well as using one socket to send data to different addresses is not supported, except that datagram sockets can be re-connected, so that the same socket is directed to another address. Below we describe the basic communication types that are available in ECLiPSe.
Note that the sockets streams in ECLiPSe are buffered like all other streams, and so it is necessary to flush the buffer in order to actually send the data to the socket. This can be done either with the flush/1 predicate or with the option %b in printf/2,3.