I understand that a stream is a representation of a sequence of bytes. Each stream provides means for reading and writing bytes to its given backing store. But what is the point of the stream? Why isn't the backing store itself what we interact with?
For whatever reason this concept just isn't clicking for me. I've read a bunch of articles, but I think I need an analogy or something.
Thanks!
The point of the stream is to provide a layer of abstraction between you and the backing store. Thus a given block of code that uses a stream need not care if the backing store is a disk file, memory, etc...
It's just a concept, another level of abstraction that makes your life easier. And they all have common interface which means you can combine them in a pipe like manner. For example, encode to base64, then zip and then write this to disk and all in one line!
The point is that you shouldn't have to know what the backing store is - it's an abstraction over it. Indeed, there might not even be a backing store - you could be reading from a network, and the data is never "stored" at all.
If you can write code that works whether you're talking to a file system, memory, a network or anything else which supports the stream idea, your code is a lot more flexible.
In addition, streams are often chained together - you can have a stream which compresses whatever is put into it, writing the compressed form on to another stream, or one which encrypts the data, etc. At the other end there'd be the reverse chain, decrypting, decompressing or whatever.
A stream is an abstracting of a sequence of bytes. The idea is that you don't need to know where the bytes come from, just that you can read them in a standardized manner.
For example, if you process data via a stream then it doesn't matter to your code if the data comes from a file, a network connection, a string, a blob in a database etc etc etc.
There's nothing wrong per-se with interacting with the backing store itself except for the fact that it ties you to the backing store implementation.
Think of streams as of an abstract source of data (bytes, characters, etc.). They abstract actual mechanics of reading from and writing to the concrete datasource, be it a network socket, file on a disk or a response from the web server.
A stream is an abstraction that provides a standard set of methods and properties for interacting with data. By abstracting away from the actual storage medium, your code can be written without total reliance on what that medium is or even the implementation of that medium.
An good analogy might be to consider a bag. You don't care what a bag is made of or what it does when you put your stuff in it, as long as the bag performs the job of being a bag and you can get your stuff back out. A stream defines for storage media what the concept of bag defines for different instances of a bag (such as trash bag, handbag, rucksack, etc.) - the rules of interaction.
It's not about streams - it's about swimming. If you can swim one Stream, than you can swim any Stream you encounter.
I think you need to consider that the backing store itself is often just another abstraction. A memory stream is pretty easy to understand, but a file is radically different depending on which file system you're using, never mind what hard drive you are using. Not all streams do in fact sit on top of a backing store: network streams pretty much just are streams.
The point of a stream is that we restrict our attention to what is important. By having a standard abstraction, we can perform common operations. Even if you don't want to, for instance, search a file or an HTTP response for URLs today, doesn't mean you won't wish to tomorrow.
Streams were originally conceived when memory was tiny compared to storage. Just reading a C file could be a significant load. Minimizing the memory footprint was extremely important. Hence, an abstraction in which very little needed to be loaded was very useful. Today, it is equally useful when performing network communication and, it turns out, rarely that restrictive when we deal with files. The ability to transparently add things like buffering in a general fashion makes it even more useful.
To add to the echo chamber, the stream is an abstraction so you don't care about the underlying store. It makes the most sense when you consider scenarios with and without streams.
Files are uninteresting for the most part because streams don't do much above and beyond what non-stream-based methods I'm familiar with did. Let's start with internet files.
If I want to download a file from the internet, I have to open a TCP socket, make a connection, and receive bytes until there are no more bytes. I have to manage a buffer, know the size of the expected file, and write code to detect when the connection is dropped and handle this appropriately.
Let's say I have some sort of TcpDataStream object. I create it with the appropriate connection information, then read bytes from the stream until it says there aren't any more bytes. The stream handles the buffer management, end-of-data conditions, and connection management.
In this way, streams make I/O easier. You could certainly write a TcpFileDownloader class that does what the stream does, but then you have a class that's specific to TCP. Most stream interfaces simply provide a Read() and Write() method, and any more complicated concepts are handled by the internal implementation. Because of this, you can use the same basic code to read or write to memory, disk files, sockets, and many other data stores.
The word "stream" has been chosen because it represents (in real life) a very similar meaning to what we want to convey when we use it.
Let's forget about the backing store for a little, and start thinking about the analogy to a water stream. You receive a continuous flow of data, just like water continuously flows in a river. You don't necessarily know where the data is coming from, and most often you don't need to; be it from a file, a socket, or any other source, it doesn't (shouldn't) really matter. This is very similar to receiving a stream of water, whereby you don't need to know where it is coming from; be it from a lake, a fountain, or any other source, it doesn't (shouldn't) really matter.
That said, once you start thinking that you only care about getting the data you need, regardless of where it comes from, the abstractions other people talked about become clearer. You start thinking that you can wrap streams, and your methods will still work perfectly. For example, you could do this:
int ReadInt(StreamReader reader) { return Int32.Parse(reader.ReadLine()); }
// in another method:
Stream fileStream = new FileStream("My Data.dat");
Stream zipStream = new ZipDecompressorStream(fileStream);
Stream decryptedStream = new DecryptionStream(zipStream);
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(decryptedStream);
int x = ReadInt(reader);
As you see, it becomes very easy to change your input source without changing your processing logic. For example, to read your data from a network socket instead of a file:
Stream stream = new NetworkStream(mySocket);
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
int x = ReadInt(reader);
As easy as it can be. And the beauty continues, as you can use any kind of input source, as long as you can build a stream "wrapper" for it. You could even do this:
public class RandomNumbersStreamReader : StreamReader {
private Random random = new Random();
public String ReadLine() { return random.Next().ToString(); }
}
// and to call it:
int x = ReadInt(new RandomNumbersStreamReader());
See? As long as your method doesn't care what the input source is, you can customize your source in various ways. The abstraction allows you to decouple input from processing logic in a very elegant way.
Note that the stream we created ourselves does not have a backing store, but it still serves our purposes perfectly.
So, to summarize, a stream is just a source of input, hiding away (abstracting) another source. As long as you don't break the abstraction, your code will be very flexible.
The visualisation I use is conveyor belts, not in real factories because I don't know anything about that, but in cartoon factories where items move along lines and get stamped and boxed and counted and checked by a sequence of dumb devices.
You have simple components that do one thing, for example a device to put a cherry on a cake. This device has an input stream of cherryless cakes, and an output stream of cakes with cherries. There are three advantages worth mentioning structuring your processing in this way.
Firstly it simplifies the components themselves: if you want to put chocolate icing on a cake, you don't need a complicated device that knows everything about cakes, you can create a dumb device that sticks chocolate icing onto whatever is fed into it (in the cartoons, this goes as far as not knowing that the next item in isn't a cake, it's Wile E. Coyote).
Secondly you can create different products by putting the devices into different sequences: maybe you want your cakes to have icing on top of the cherry instead of cherry on top of the icing, and you can do that simply by swapping the devices around on the line.
Thirdly, the devices don't need to manage inventory, boxing, or unboxing. The most efficient way of aggregating and packaging things is changeable: maybe today you're putting your cakes into boxes of 48 and sending them out by the truckload, but tomorrow you want to send out boxes of six in response to custom orders. This kind of change can be accommodated by replacing or reconfiguring the machines at the start and end of the production line; the cherry machine in the middle of the line doesn't have to be changed to process a different number of items at a time, it always works with one item at a time and it doesn't have to know how its input or output is being grouped.
The best explanation of streams I've seen is chapter 3 of SICP. (You may need to read the first 2 chapters for it to make sense, but you should anyway. :-)
They don't use sterams for bytes at all, but rather integers. The big points that I got from it were: