Can you explain the concept of streams?

Question

I understand that a stream is a representation of a sequence of bytes. Each stream provides means for reading and writing bytes to its given backing store. But what is the

Answer 1

The point is that you shouldn't have to know what the backing store is - it's an abstraction over it. Indeed, there might not even be a backing store - you could be reading from a network, and the data is never "stored" at all.

If you can write code that works whether you're talking to a file system, memory, a network or anything else which supports the stream idea, your code is a lot more flexible.

In addition, streams are often chained together - you can have a stream which compresses whatever is put into it, writing the compressed form on to another stream, or one which encrypts the data, etc. At the other end there'd be the reverse chain, decrypting, decompressing or whatever.