Local Services

Finally, there are some built-in service routines that are made available in two places: the evaluation environment of the initial invocation dictated to the PLANStart program, and to the evaluation environment of programs executed in the PLAN read-eval-print loop (see the tutorial document for more). These services include thisHost and getHostByName, as described above in the core services, as well as the following:

• 
  Converts the argument (a PLAN value) into a string, and prints it to the local console.
• 
  Takes the filename given and reads the binary data into an opaque value of type . This service could be used to deliver payloads, via ports, or to install new services via the installServices routine. If the specified file can't be found, the FileNotFound exception is raised.