ANSI Common Lisp 21 Streams 21.1 Stream Concepts
21.1.1 Introduction to Streams
A stream is an object that can be used with an input or output
function to identify an appropriate source or sink of characters or
bytes for that operation.
A character stream is a source or sink of characters.
A binary stream is a source or sink of bytes.
Some operations may be performed on any kind of stream;
the next figure provides a list of standardized operations
that are potentially useful with any kind of stream.
Some General-Purpose Stream Operations
Other operations are only meaningful on certain stream types.
For example, read-char is only defined for character streams
and read-byte is only defined for binary streams.
184.108.40.206 Abstract Classifications of Streams
220.127.116.11 Abstract Classifications of Streams
18.104.22.168 Other Subclasses of Stream