5 The Streams Module

5.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the Streams module, which allows you to establish and control input to and output from aggregates of data, such as files on disk, or sequences. This module, together with the Standard-IO module, provides similar functionality to the Java.io package in Java. See Chapter 6, "The Standard-IO Module", for details about the Standard-IO module in Dylan.

Section 5.4 on page 31 discusses the basic concepts involved in streaming over data. Section 5.5 on page 35 describes the different classes of stream available, and how to create them, and Section 5.6 on page 44 describes how to read from and write to them.

More specialized subjects are covered next: Section 5.5.3 on page 42 discusses locking streams while they are in use; Section 5.7 on page 51 describes using buffered streams; Section 5.8 on page 52 describes wrapper streams; Section 5.9 on page 55 the different stream-specific error conditions that can be raised.For the most part, you do not have to worry about the information in these later sections when using streams.

Finally, Section 5.11 on page 59 gives complete details on all interfaces in the Streams module. Each entry in this section is arranged in alphabetical order.