What are streams in programming?

A stream represents a sequence of objects (usually bytes, but not necessarily so), which can be accessed in sequential order. Typical .... read more

Programming this way is often referred to as functional reactive programming (i.e. functions that react to streams of events). Some of you might be thinking, that sounds like an event dispatcher! And you'd be right, an event stream does pretty much exactly the same as an event dispatcher in this example. read more

A particular stream might support reading (in which case it is an"input stream"), writing ("output stream") or both. Not all streams are seekable. Push back is fairly rare, but you can always add it to a stream by wrapping the real input stream in another input stream that holds an internal buffer. read more

A stream can be used similarly to a list, but later elements are only calculated when needed. Streams can therefore represent infinite sequences and series. In the Smalltalk standard library and in other programming languages as well, a stream is an external iterator. As in Scheme, streams can represent finite or infinite sequences. read more