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Another issue
is whether the IPC primitives are integated with file
and terminal I/O.
The integration would make the OS API become smaller,
hence easier to understand and learn,
and also allow late binding of a source or destination of information.
On the other hand, it would not allow functionality
specific to message passing such as send this message urgently.
Unix sockets, which we will see in some detail later,
resolve this problem by allowing traditional I/O routines such as
read and write to be also used for message passing and providing additional
special routines such as send and recv to handle
message-specific communication.
Prasun Dewan
2006-02-02