Data flow computation

All data flow models describe computation in terms of locally controlled events; each event is the “firing” of an “actor”. There is no notion of a single point or locus of control—nothing corresponding to the program location counter of a conventional sequential computer. Since many actors may be ready to fire, these models can represent many asynchronous concurrent computational events. Nevertheless, they can guarantee an input/output behavior that is unaffected by the order in which the firing of actors is carried out. This property of data flow models—determinacy—ensures that their input/output behavior is functional. Thus the semantics of data flow graphs are closely related to the semantics of applicative programming languages, and we will illustrate the correspondence of data flow graphs to textual programs by means of program fragments written in Val, an applicative programming language developed at MIT for scientific applications.

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