I/O in the 21st century – knowing the streams

Many I/O-related activities handle streams of data. A stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time. Wikipedia says:

"A stream can be thought of as a conveyor belt that allows items to be processed one at a time rather than in large batches."

At the lowest level, all streams are bytes, but using a high-level interface could obviously help the programmer handle their data. This is the reason why a stream object usually has methods such as read, seek, write, and so on, just to make handling a byte stream a bit simpler.

In this recipe, you'll see some stream utilization examples.

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