The GNU libc manual mentions that there are historical reasons that the data structure representing "streams" is called FILE.
After getting curious i've googled around and tried to look into it but I can't seem to find this fabulous tale.
Any ideas?
While I don't have a citation for this, it's likely that the historical reason for the creation of the term "stream" is standardization of the C language.
FILE
is the type that was always used withFILE *
handles for stdio in C, but in order to express the specification for the stdio interfaces, it's necessary to be able to distinguish between a file (the actual storage object) and the handle for an open file, and "stream" seems to have been the word that was chosen.