ABSTRACT
So far you have learned about classification, storage, and initialization of data. These operations are internal to the program and, therefore, relatively independent from the machine's hardware. The designers of Java defined data types and data-manipulation instructions in a way that ensured that they could be implemented with relative ease, in any modern computer. This is not easy to achieve with data input and output operations. Input and output requires the intervention of hardware devices, such as the keyboard, the mouse, the video system, or the printer. This makes data input and output functions device-dependent and very difficult to define and implement in a language, such as Java, which aims at device-independence. The result is that input and output operations in Java are often considered difficult and complicated.
