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 AIXoperating 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. (1996-11-06)
