Throughout the Standard Library, the term 'stream' is used multiple times. ifstream, stringstream, ostream, but what's the point of the 'stream' part of the names? Why do they call all of these classes 'stream's?
Basically, yes. It's an abstraction of that process.
Think of an output stream as a sink. You can dump as much water as you want, but you can't get it out. Following the analogy, an input stream would be a faucet, and memory would be a bucket, or perhaps a set of glasses.
iostream - Where's the Stream?