Had trouble finding a definition on the Internet, finally found some good stuff on pages 298 - 300 of "Teach Yourself C Programming in 21 Days""

A stream is a sequence of characters. More exactly, it is a sequence of bytes of data. A sequence of bytes flowing into a program is an input stream; a sequence of bytes flowing out of a program is an output stream. The major advantage of streams is that input/output programming is device independent. ...

Every C stream is connected to a file. In this context, the term file does not refer to a disk file. Rather it is an intermediate step between the stream that your program deals with and the actual physical device being used for input or output. ...

C streams fall into two modes: text and binary. ... Text streams are organized into lines, which can be up to 255 characters long and are terminated by an end-of-line, or newline, character.

Linux has five standard streams:

• stdin
• stdout
• stderr
• stdprn (dos only)
• stdaux (dos only)

The book is useful, because it goes on to list the standard library's stream input/output functions, and the versions that use a standard stream vs. those that require a stream name.

I suspect I have a clue as to what a filestream and a datastream are, but I'm not 100% sure.

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• C Programming Language

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Resources

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Recommended

• (rhk) 9 Simple use of files: 9.1 Dealing with more data; ; —
• (rhk) DEFINITION Streams; (* portable *); ; — This is from / for Oberon (another language, IIRC, so while it may be helpful, it is not canonical.
• (rhk) SY DE 121 ­ Digital Computation - Fall, 2002; ; — a course outline, only found Google cached copy, so may be a dead link by now.
• (rhk) [[][]]; ; —
• (rhk) [[][]]; ; —
• (rhk) [[][]]; ; —
• (rhk) [[][]]; ; —

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• () RandyKramer - 02 May 2003
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