What is a Stream?

• A stream is a flow of characters (or other kind of data)

• If the flow is into your program, the stream is called an input stream

• If the flow is out of your program, the stream is called an output stream

• Although you may not have realized it, you’ve already been using streams in your program:

  • cin is an input stream connected to the keyboard (stdin)
  • cout is an output stream connected to the screen (stdout)

• We’ll show how extend the use of streams to perform file i/o

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