Dataflow Programming Language

   A programming paradigm in which computation is modelled as a directed graph (which may or may not contain cycles), the nodes of which are either data sources (producers of data), data sinks (consumers), or "processing elements" which compute some function; and the arcs of which represent dataflow between nodes.

   Dataflow programming languages share some features of functional languages, and were generally developed in order to bring some functional concepts to a language more suitable for numeric processing.

Representation

Dataflow programs start with an input, perhaps the command line parameters, and illustrate how that data is used and modified. The flow of data is explicit, often visually illustrated as a line or pipe.

In terms of encoding, a dataflow program might be implemented as a hash table, with uniquely identified inputs as the keys, used to look up pointers to the instructions. When any operation completes, the program scans down the list of operations until it finds the first operation where all inputs are currently valid, and runs it. When that operation finishes, it will typically output data, thereby making another operation become valid.