Input and output Streams let Rexx communicate with external objects, such as people, files, queues, serial interfaces, displays, and networks. In programming there are many stream actions that can be coded as methods for manipulating the various Stream objects. These methods and objects are organized in the Stream class.
The methods are used to open streams for reading or writing, close streams at the end of an operation, move the line-read or line-write position within a file stream, or get information about a stream. Methods are also provided to get character strings from a stream or send them to a stream, count characters in a stream, flush buffered data to a stream, query path specifications, time stamps, size, and other information from a stream, or do any other I/O stream manipulation (see Input and Output for examples).
The class Stream is a mixin class (it can be inherited by other classes), it subclasses (specializes) The InputOutputStream Class .