ANN: A brief introduction to streams ... plus a stream library

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

Lately I have been digging into streams and am really excited about it. I would like to share what I've learned. 

I wrote a short article on streams. Also, I created a simple stream library so that I (and you) can use it to create stream programs today.

Here are the first few paragraphs of my article:

INTRODUCTION

Streams have the potential to take XML to the next level by facilitating the processing of
huge XML documents.

A stream is a sequence of data. For example, a series of bank deposits and withdrawals is
a stream. The sequence of integers between 10,000 and 100,000,000 is a stream. There
may even be infinite streams.

What distinguishes a stream from an ordinary sequence is delayed evaluation. The idea is
this: construct a stream only partially and pass the partial construction to the program that
consumes the stream. If the consumer attempts to access a part of the stream that has not
yet been constructed, the stream will automatically construct just enough more to produce
the required part, thus preserving the illusion that the entire stream exists.

More ... http://www.xfront.com/stream/streams.pdf 

/Roger