[Python-Dev] Pervasive socket failures on Windows (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Feb 11 01:14:23 CET 2006

Tim Peters wrote:

[Martin v. Löwis] > In any case, POSIX makes it undefined what FDSET does when the > socket is larger than FDSETSIZE, and apparently clearly expects > an fdset to be a bit mask.

Yup -- although the people who designed the fdset macros to begin with didn't appear to have this assumption.

I don't agree. I rather think the entire purpose of the fdset interface was simply to allow more than 32 items in the set (which the original select() in BSD was limited to). The whole thing still seems totally bitmask-oriented, down to the confusion between set size and file descriptor number.

The MacOSX man page for select() (which seems fairly closely BSD-based) even explicitly says "The descriptor sets are stored as bit fields in arrays of integers."

Greg

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