I fail at python sockets, hard

I'm trying to make something that once it is disconnected will automatically try to reconnect.  I'll add some more features in later so it doesn't hammer the server but right now I just want to keep it simple and get that part working.  The problem is that when I use sock.close I get an error message of
Bad File Descriptor
and if I either use shutdown or just go straight to reconnecting I get:
Transport endpoint is already connected

This is what I've got right now:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import socket, string
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
def doconn():
    sock.connect(("localhost", 1234))
def dodiscon():
    sock.close()
    doconn()

doconn()

while (1):
    buffer = sock.recv(1024)
    if not buffer:
        dodiscon()


What am I doing wrong?

Another question for the programmers of /prog/:

Say you have a data structure in C, and you have a function to malloc a new structure, and return it et cetera.

Do you create a function and get passed in a pointer to a pointer to a struct, or return a pointer to a struct:


int
ds_init(struct ds **ptr)
{
  *ptr = malloc(sizeof(**ptr));

  // Of course you can return more interesting integers for errors et cetera.
  return 1;
}