-This class provides functions that read data types in a
-portable way. It can be forced to read in big-endian order or
-little-endian order. So, a file written by an Intel processor can be read by a
-Sparc or anything else.
+This class provides functions that read binary data types in a
+portable way. Data can be read in either big-endian or litte-endian
+format, little-endian being the default on all architectures.
+
+If you want to read data from text files (or streams) use
+\helpref{wxTextInputStream}{wxtextinputstream} instead.
+
+The >> operator is overloaded and you can use this class like a standard C++ iostream.
+Note, however, that the arguments are the fixed size types wxUint32, wxInt32 etc
+and on a typical 32-bit computer, none of these match to the "long" type (wxInt32
+is defined as signed int on 32-bit architectures) so that you cannot use long. To avoid
+problems (here and elsewhere), make use of the wxInt32, wxUint32, etc types.
+
+For example:
+\begin{verbatim}
+ wxFileInputStream input( "mytext.dat" );
+ wxDataInputStream store( input );
+ wxUint8 i1;
+ float f2;
+ wxString line;
+
+ store >> i1; // read a 8 bit integer.
+ store >> i1 >> f2; // read a 8 bit integer followed by float.
+ store >> line; // read a text line
+\end{verbatim}
+
+See also \helpref{wxDataOutputStream}{wxdataoutputstream}.
+
+\wxheading{Derived from}
+
+None