Online Computer Dictionary
Queried for: stream
Definition:
1. An abstraction referring to any flow of
data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or
receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel
of some kind, as opposed to packets which may be addressed
and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients.
Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a
channel or a "connection" between the sender and receiver.
2. In the C language's buffered input/ouput
library functions, a stream is associated with a file or
device which has been opened using fopen. Characters may be
read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual
source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently
by the library routines.
3. Confusingly, Sun have called their
modular device driver mechanism "STREAMS".
4. In IBM's AIX operating system, a
stream is a full-duplex processing and data transfer path
between a driver in kernel space and a process in user
space.
[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts,
SC23-2206-03].
5. streaming.
6. lazy list.
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