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

To add to the echo chamber, the stream is an abstraction so you don't care about the underlying store. It makes the most sense when you consider scenarios with and without streams.

Files are uninteresting for the most part because streams don't do much above and beyond what non-stream-based methods I'm familiar with did. Let's start with internet files.

If I want to download a file from the internet, I have to open a TCP socket, make a connection, and receive bytes until there are no more bytes. I have to manage a buffer, know the size of the expected file, and write code to detect when the connection is dropped and handle this appropriately.

Let's say I have some sort of TcpDataStream object. I create it with the appropriate connection information, then read bytes from the stream until it says there aren't any more bytes. The stream handles the buffer management, end-of-data conditions, and connection management.

In this way, streams make I/O easier. You could certainly write a TcpFileDownloader class that does what the stream does, but then you have a class that's specific to TCP. Most stream interfaces simply provide a Read() and Write() method, and any more complicated concepts are handled by the internal implementation. Because of this, you can use the same basic code to read or write to memory, disk files, sockets, and many other data stores.