[9fans] bidirectional pipes

[Mike Haertel <mike@ducky.net>]

>While this is cool, I have to admit that I never really liked
>bidirectional pipes, because if you want to close half of the connection,
>you either need something like bsd's shutdown(), or a way to recover
>your control file which hopefully will let you half-close.

I'm curious?  Why does this bother you?  Just let half the connection
go unused.

My very first reaction to bidirectional pipes, when I first heard of
them in some journal article about v8 Unix many years ago, was: wow,
that is such an obvious win, why wasn't it done years ago?

The only thing I can think to explain your position is that it's a
semi-religious issue, rather like dynamically typed vs. staticly
typed languages: some people like the greater flexibility associated
with type checks only at the point you actually try to use the
value, whereas others want to get their error messages right away.
And some people like the flexibility of bidirectional pipes, whereas
others would like to get errors back from "incorrect" read and write
system calls immediately.