5 The Streams Module

5.3 Goals of the module

The Streams module provides:

A generic, easy-to-use interface for streaming over sequences and files. The same high-level interface for consuming or producing is available irrespective of the type of stream, or the types of the elements being streamed over.
Efficiency, especially for the common case of file I/O.
Access to an underlying buffer management protocol.

The Streams module does not address a number of related issues, including:

A standard object-printing package such as Smalltalk's printOn: or Lisp's print-object, or a formatted printing facility such as Lisp's format. These facilities are provided by the Print, Format, and Format-out libraries. For convenience, the Functional-Extensions library also provides simple formatting capabilities.
General object dumping and loading.
A comprehensive range of I/O facilities for using memory-mapped files, network connections, and so on.
An interface for naming files. The Locators module provides such an interface.
An interface to operating system functionality, such as file renaming or deleting operations. The File-System module provides such an interface.