I have very little idea what I'm doing here, I've never done anything like this before, but a friend and I are writing competing chess programs and they need to be able to communicate to each other.

He'll be writing mainly in C, the bulk of mine will be in Python, and I can see a few options:

• Alternately write to a temp file, or successive temp files. As the communication won't be in any way bulky this could work, but seems like an ugly work-around to me, the programs will have to keep checking for change/new files, it just seems ugly.
• Find some way of manipulating pipes i.e. mine.py| ./his . This seems like a bit of a dead end.
• Use sockets. But I don't know what I'd be doing, so could someone give me a pointer to some reading material? I'm not sure if there are OS-independent, language independent methods. Would there have to be some kind of supervisor server program to administrate?
• Use some kind of HTML protocol, which seems like overkill. I don't mind the programs having to run on the same machine.

What do people recommend, and where can I start reading?