It is the standard method of inter-machine communication.
Some systems also support reliable connectionless connections.
The extensions are mainly for asynchronous communication to allow socket programming to better interact with the Microsoft Windows operating system. A number of support routines are included. There are routines provided for simple conversions of integers to a network format for inter-machine communication. This allows for a large amount of control, but it also means that a large number of steps are needed to perform operations. The code to perform this procedure is shown in figure 5.