Stream
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
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. <programming> 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. <operating system> Confusingly,
Sun have called their modular
device driver mechanism "
STREAMS".
4. <operating system> 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. <programming>
lazy list.
