A Note About Terminology
The Essential Tools Module provides input and output classes that let you save and restore objects. These classes are:
RWFile —
RWFile lets you save and restore objects to a file.
RWvostream — Classes derived from
RWvostream, such as
RWpostream,
RWbostream, and
RWeostream, are used to save objects.
RWvistream — Classes derived from
RWvistream, such as
RWpistream,
RWbistream, and
RWeistream, are used to restore objects.
To keep our explanations simple, we'll refer to all of these input and output classes as
streams. For a discussion of the trade-offs in using
RWvostream and
RWvistream versus
RWFile, see
Chapter 5 and
Chapter 10.