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 6 lists the Virtual Stream Classes. This chapter provides information on using some of these classes; the SourcePro API Reference Guide provides detailed information on each class in this class group.

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

The later sections in this chapter discuss these classes, and the SourcePro API Reference Guide provides detailed information on each class in this class group.