Reading from main memory is faster than reading from disk/STDIN.
BufferedReader uses a technique called buffering that allows us to reduce how often we read from disk/STDIN by copying chunks to main memory.
Consider:
BufferedReader in = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
in.read(); //
in.read(); //
// ...
in.read(); // could be hitting the disk/STDIN a lot (slow!)
vs:
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
in.read(); //
in.read(); //
// ...
in.read(); // hitting main memory a lot (fast!)
From the documentation:
Without buffering, each invocation of read() could cause bytes to be read from [disk/STDIN], converted into characters, and then returned, which can be very inefficient.
使用转换流的时候:
数据在硬盘上用 字节形式存储
数据到程序中以字符形式存在
①:数据从硬盘到内存时用InputStreamReader (将硬盘上的数据由字节转成字符放到内存中)
②:数据从内存到硬盘时用OutputStreamWriter (将内存中的字符转成字节以便存储到硬盘)