Stream (disambiguation)
The primary meaning of stream is a moving body of water, confined within a bed and banks and having a detectable current. Stream is the umbrella term used in the scientific community for all flowing natural waters.
By extension, a stream is any steady flow or succession of material. It could be water, air, radio signal, words (as in "a stream of abuse") etc.. The word has also some specialized senses:
- streaming media is a way of delivering radio and television over the Internet.
- High speed streams of air in the upper atmosphere are called jet streams.
- Ocean currents are sometimes referred to as streams, e.g. the Gulf Stream.
In computing, the term stream is used in a number of ways, in all cases referring to a succession of data elements made available over time:
- On Unix and related systems based on the C programming language, a stream is a source or sink of data, usually individual bytes or characters. Streams are an abstraction used when reading or writing files, or communicating over network sockets. The standard streams are three streams made available to all programs.
- In the Scheme programming language and some others, a stream is a lazily evaluated or delayed sequence of data elements. A stream can be used similarly to a list, but later elements are only calculated when needed. Streams can therefore represent infinite sequences and series. [1]