winsock (idea)

Stuck at a Windows box reading Microsoft's developer documentation for Winsock, I laughed quite a bit at the following sentence:

"Winsock is based on the BSD socket API."

Yeah, right, I wish. See bastardization.

What I don't like about Winsock:

• You must initialize it with WSAStartup() bullcrap, which must supply a library version number
• You cannot access them through ordinary file I/O calls. Before I didn't RTFM and assumed you could, after all, this is the BSD socket API, is it not? Wrong!
• Instead of a sane int as a descriptor, it's a SOCKET typedef, which is an unsigned int pointer!
• Functions don't return a single consistant value on error like they should. On UNIX it's -1. Windows? It varies. This is because sockets are pointers, rather than file descriptors as they should be.

I'd say what they did, was take some BSD code, and say, "How can we force our incoherent coding style down this?"