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When I look at the NSFileHandle API docs, I see there are a lot of networking methods talking about sockets and stuff like that…
At the top, they say:
NSFileHandle objects provide an
object-oriented wrapper for accessing
open files or communications channels.
What’s an “communication channel” here? Are there some practical examples that explain it for someone who’s not a networking-ninja?
Basically it’s an abstraction letting you access a variety of communications channels using a common interface. It applies to most things with which you send and/or receive bytes of data.
Could be pipe (which is a way of communicating between processes on the same computer); a socket, which is basically the end point of an IP connection; a device such as a piece of hardware with which you can exchange data. All these get abstracted to a sort of file-like IO with read and write instructions.
Using a file handle lets you ignore the underlying detail (netwworking etc.) and just get at the data.