Topic summary
Dataflow language
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Dataflow programming.
History
In a 1966 Ph.D. thesis, The On-line Graphical Specification of Computer Procedures, Bert Sutherland created one of the first graphical dataflow programming frameworks in order to make parallel programming easier. Subsequent dataflow languages were often developed at the large supercomputer labs. POGOL, an otherwise conventional data-processing language developed at NSA, compiled large-scale applications composed of multiple file-to-file operations, e.g. merge, select, summarize, or transform, into efficient code that eliminated the creation of or writing to intermediate files to the greatest extent possible. SISAL, a popular dataflow language developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, looks like most statement-driven languages, but variables should be assigned once. This allows the compiler to easily identify the inputs and outputs. A number of offshoots of SISAL have been developed, including SAC, Single Assignment C, which tries to remain as close to the popular C programming language as possible.