Agree, i thought the name is awful as I expected to see something related to I/O and buffering of content. It looks like a handy list object and seeing "stream" everywhere was just blinding.

However, right at the bottom the etymology of the name is made clear:

> The name 'stream' is used in Scheme, a LISP dialect that supports these features.

So the name is from the FP community. Given the cultural issues, a name change seems unlikely...

Here's a helpful two-part Berkeley lecture on the topic: http://academicearth.org/lectures/streams-i

I didn't know that series of lectures, so thanks a hundred times. (Just spend the evening watching the first two hours and bought Harvey's book as well.)

It's also used in Ocaml and SML, as far as I remember.

Don't you think that a data stream is a special case of this kind f stream that just happens to have a bunch f idiosyncratic names in it's API? It's not like these streams are a completely different idea.