I'm not sure this is so common that it's really worth adding more arguments to TCPSocket (and complicate it).

I've been considering to refactor Socket to look more like Ruby, where Socket has all the low level C-like methods (bind, listen, ...), so we have access to everything, and where TCPSocket and UDPSocket are limited, but simple, abstractions on top of it.

This way one could:

sock = Socket.new(Socket::Protocol::TCP)
sock.bind(local_host, local_port)
sock.connect(host, port)

Or by making the connection lazy:

sock = TCPSocket.new(host, port)
sock.bind(local_host, local_port)

I agree, Ruby/C style is much better but I wanted to avoid breaking anything with this patch. In order to have an explicit bind call an explicit connect call is also needed, which TCPSocket does not currently have (but UDPSocket does 😕).

@ysbaddaden , @maxpowa
In Ruby I like the different between the "client" and "server" helper wrappers around the socket class.

client: TCPSocket.new("127.0.0.1", 8080)
server: TCPServer.new(8080) (listens on 0.0.0.0 on port 8080) and TCPServer.new("127.0.0.1", 8080) (listens on 127.0.0.1 on port 8080)
raw socket: Socket.new
Shouldn't we conform to this standard ?