stream

1. a small river; brook

2. Brit any of several parallel classes of schoolchildren, or divisions of children within a class, grouped together because of similar ability

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

stream

[strēm]

(computer science)

A collection of binary digits that are transmitted in a continuous sequence, and from which extraneous data such as control information or parity bits are excluded.

(hydrology)

A body of running water moving under the influence of gravity to lower levels in a narrow, clearly defined natural channel.

stream

i. To deploy the tail chute. Normally, it is used as an instruction on a radio telephone to “stream the tail chute.”
ii. To dispense chaff as solid. It may be dispensed at random intervals or in bursts.
iii. To take off or land in stream (i.e., one after at another in approximately equal intervals).

STREAM

(1)

["STREAM: A Scheme Language for Formally Describing Digital Circuits", C.D. Kloos in PARLE: Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, LNCS 259, Springer 1987].

stream

(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.

stream

(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.

stream

(operating system)

Confusingly, Sun have called their modular device driver mechanism "STREAMS".

stream

(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].

stream

(communications)

streaming.

stream

(programming)

lazy list.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

stream

(1) To transmit live or on-demand audio or video content while users listen or watch. This was the original meaning of the term; however, it has evolved to become a synonym for "transmit" and is used to refer to transmitting wired or wireless from any source to a destination. See streaming.

(2) The continuous flow of data from one place to another.

(3) Any contiguous group of bytes or chunk/block of data.

(4) The I/O management in the C programming language. A stream is a channel through which data flows to/from a disk, keyboard, printer, etc.

(5) The data part of a Structured Storage file. See Structured Storage.

Copyright © 1981-2025 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Stream

a term designating all flowing bodies of water, including rivers, mountain streams, brooks formed by rain storms and thaws, and channels, regardless of size and origin. Streams flow over more or less erodable soils, forming a bed or channel. The characteristics of the channel depend on the specific features of the stream, including flow rate, flow velocities, and slope, and also on the properties of the soil. A stream is characterized by fluviomorphological processes, which cause the channel to meander.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Table 1 Frequencies of ten selected let-formations in two corpora of English Form (SEM) COCA Internet (Eng) booklet (O) 1,437 100,800,000 droplet (O) 1,037 23,730,000 leaflet (O) 954 34,700,000 starlet (P) 446 53,720,000 piglet (A) 263 16,450,000 playlet (O) 17 536,000 streamlet (O) 14 307,800 froglet (A) 13 279,000 bosslet (P) 7 88,036 wifelet (P) 0 76,500

Diminutive -let in English

The circle of the bridge was whole, Where, arched, the trouted streamlet stole.

Fathering graces at Hampstead: Manley Hopkins' "The Old Trees" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars"

The streamlet alongside the path looks harmless enough.

Rambles and scrambles: conwy valley river walk

That image also brings to 'my mind Words-worth's "Michael," if you recall that "heap of stones, which by the streamlet's edge/ Lay thrown together." There's also an echo of the "peak" passage from The Prelude in "The Most of It," when a threatening "embodiment" of--what?--manifests itself to the speaker:

The End of the Poem: "The Mountain" by Robert Frost

"Or it is as if a tiny streamlet enters the sea, from which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it all becomes one" (ibid.).

Writing anxiety in Teresa's 'Interior Castle.'

The Borba Gato streamlet, approximate 8 km long, lies totally within the municipality of Maringa, Parana State, Brazil.

Physic-chemical evaluation of leach and water from the Borba Gato streamlet within the catchment area of the urban waste landfill of Maringa, Parana State, Brazil/Avaliacao fisico-quimica do lixiviado e da agua do ribeirao Borba Gato na area de influencia do aterro de residuos de Maringa, Estado do Parana, Brasil

There was a range from 7 to 25 species found in each environment sampled on Ilha da Marambaia, where the streamlet exhibited the lowest richness and the dam the highest.

Bat diversity of Ilha da Marambaia, Southern Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil (Chiroptera, Mammalia)/Diversidade de morcegos da Ilha da Marambaia, Sul do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (Chiroptera, Mammalia)