sockets -- basic udp client

[Roy Smith]

In article "rluse1 at gmail.com" <rluse1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you don't care about the address of the sender, e.g. you are not
> going to send anything back, is there an advantage to using recv()?

At the system call level, recv() is marginally faster since there's less 
data to pass back and forth between the kernel and user space.  Not that 
this is likely to be significant in any real-world application.

The bigger advantage to recv() is that the interface is simpler, so there's 
less code to write.  For the C interface, using recv() instead of 
recvfrom() frees you from having to pass in two arguments that you're not 
going to use.  From the Python interface, it frees you from having to 
unpack the tuple that recvfrom() returns.  Instead of:

data, address = recvfrom(bufsize)

you write

data = recv(bufsize)

It's not just a bunch less typing, it's also easier to understand.  You 
don't leave some future maintainer of your code scratching their head 
trying to figure out where 'address' is used, when in fact, it's not.