So far, this lesson has focused on streams, which provide a simple model for reading and writing data. Streams work with a large variety of data sources and destinations, including disk files. However, streams don't support all the operations that are common with disk files. In this part of the lesson, we'll focus on non-stream file I/O. There are two topics:

• File is a class that helps you write platform-independent code that examines and manipulates files and directories.
• Random access files support nonsequential access to disk file data.