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 userspace.

[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts,

SC23-2206-03].

5. communications streaming.

6. programming lazy list.

(1996-11-06)