RPC programs
An RPC server offers its procedures as parts of a "program". Here, the notion of programs is introduced. A program is identified by a program number and a version number. The service of a program is a set of procedures that are described by procedure numbers and signatures. The signature of a procedure is a pair (s,u) of XDR types that should be interpreted as function s -> u. To make work easier, programs are encapsulated as an opaque type t. This data structure can store procedure names in addition to the plain numbers, so you can refer to procedures by their names. But note that these names are only local identifiers that are not transferred in the RPC protocol. The signature can be formulated upon a type system (a set of definitions of type names).
Type of RPC programs
create program_nr version_nr type_system procedures
signature p name
returns the triple (proc_nr, in_t, out_t)
for the procedure name
. proc_nr
is the procedure number,
in_t
the argument type and out_t
the result type.