1. < communications > 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 packet s 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. < communications > streaming .
6.
lazy list .
(1996-11-06)