 reads are buffered and the performance differences between
different receive patterns are negligible.  
</p>

<p>
Another advantage is the flexible timeout control
mechanism. As in C, all I/O  operations are blocking by default. For
example, the  <a href=tcp.html#send><tt>send</tt></a>,  
<a href=tcp.html#receive><tt>receive</tt></a> and 
<a href=tcp.html#accept><tt>accept</tt></a> methods
of the TCP domain will block  the  caller application  until
the operation  is completed (if ever!). However, with a c