What's so standard about standard input or standard output?

Question

Why can't they just call it input or output?

This is more of a historical question I think than a programming question.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about History of Terms. — Matas Vaitkevicius, Jul 21 '14 at 12:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 28 '13 at 06:39

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Read this document The ins and outs of standard input/output

answered Oct 28 '13 at 06:39

Thusitha Thilina Dayaratne

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 28 '13 at 06:40

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Because you can change how a program's IO behaves, e.g. reading bytes over a network or writing to a file. STDIN and STDOUT (and STDERR) are the defaults. Or, if you will, the standards.

answered Oct 28 '13 at 06:40

joews

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What's so standard about standard input or standard output?

2 Answers2