The Essential Tools Module Virtual Stream Classes let you perform streaming operations such as transferring information between operating systems with the efficiency of a binary stream. The endian streams mechanism, which keeps a record of the operating environment where information originates, allows the stream to be read on any system regardless of its native size or byte order.

Table 8: Virtual Stream Classes

A number of special-purpose classes complement the functionality of the virtual streams classes. These are listed in Table 2:

Table 9: Special-Purpose Stream Classes