Subclassing socket

[groups.20.thebriguy at spamgourmet.com]

Steve,

To your question of why you'd ever receive value:

This is very common in any network programming.  If you send a packet
of data that has a header and payload, and the header contains the
length (N) of the payload, then at some point you have to receive N
bytes.  If N is zero, then you receive 0 bytes.  Of course, you CAN
test for N == 0, that's obvious - but why would you if the underlying
layers worked correctly?  Its just extra code to handle an special case.