A good answer might be:

A Reader is an input stream.

Readers and Writers deal with character streams. These are abstract classes; a program will use classes derived from them. For example, a BufferedReader is a Reader that many example programs have used.

Character streams are optimized for handling character data. They also translate between the internal format used by Java programs and an external format used for text files. Inside a Java program all character data is represented with the 16-bit char data type (even when the characters are contained in a string). On a disk file, characters are represented in a format called UTF. This format uses one, two, or three bytes per character and is intended to be a universal format---the same format for all text files anywhere in the world.

UTF stands for "Universal character set Transformation Format". (Most people decide to forget that and call it "Universal Text Format"). For most situations, a UTF text file is identical to a text file using the ASCII format. A file created with NotePad is an ASCII text file, and thereby automatically a UTF text file. However, a UTF text file can use many different alphabets, such as Cyrillic and Asian characters. A UTF text file can contain characters that are not ASCII. By reading and writing UTF files, Java programs can process text from any of the World's languages.

QUESTION 8:

Could a Java program use the alphabet used by the people of Java?