From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 January 2023):
STREAM
["STREAM: A Scheme Language for Formally Describing Digital
Circuits", C.D. Kloos in PARLE: Parallel Architectures and
Languages Europe, LNCS 259, Springer 1987].
(1995-01-30)
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 January 2023):
stream
1. <communications> An abstraction referring to any flow of
data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or
receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel
of some kind, as opposed to packets which may be addressed
and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients.
Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a
channel or a "connection" between the sender and receiver.
2. <programming> In the C language's buffered input/ouput
library functions, a stream is associated with a file or
device which has been opened using fopen. Characters may be
read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual
source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently
by the library routines.
3. <operating system> Confusingly, Sun have called their
modular device driver mechanism "STREAMS".
4. <operating system> In IBM's AIX operating system, a
stream is a full-duplex processing and data transfer path
between a driver in kernel space and a process in user
space.
[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts,
SC23-2206-03].
5. <communications> streaming.
6. <programming> lazy list.
(1996-11-06)