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In computer programming, a dataflow language is a programming language that implements dataflow principles and architecture, and models a program, conceptually if not physically, as a directed graph of the data flowing between operations. Dataflow 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. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Dataflow architecture. ... Computer programming (often shortened to programming or coding) is the process of writing, testing, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Dataflow architecture. ... This article just presents the basic definitions. ... Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. ...

Properties of dataflow languages

Dataflow languages contrast with the majority of programming languages, which use the imperative programming model. In imperative programming the program is modelled as a series of operations, the data being effectively invisible. This distinction may seem minor, but the paradigm shift is fairly dramatic, and allows dataflow languages to be spread out across multicore, multiprocessor systems for free. In computer science, imperative programming, as opposed to declarative programming, is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of a program state and statements that change the program state. ... Paradigm shift is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. ... A multicore processor is a chip with more than one processing units (cores). ... Multiprocessing is traditionally known as the use of multiple concurrent processes in a system as opposed to a single process at any one instant. ...

One of the key concepts in computer programming is the idea of "state", essentially a snapshot of the measure of various conditions in the system. Most programming languages require a considerable amount of state information in order to operate properly, information which is generally hidden from the programmer. For a real world example, consider a three-way light switch. Typically a switch turns on a light by moving it to the "up" position, but in a three-way case that may turn the light back off — the result is based on the state of the other switch, which is likely out of view.

In fact, the state is often hidden from the computer itself as well, which normally has no idea that this piece of information encodes state, while that is temporary and will soon be discarded. This is a serious problem, as the state information needs to be shared across multiple processors in parallel processing machines. Without knowing which state is important and which isn't, most languages force the programmer to add a considerable amount of extra code to indicate which data and parts of the code are important in this respect. Parallel processing is the ability of the brain to simultaneously process incoming stimuli. ...

This code tends to be both expensive in terms of performance, as well as difficult to debug and often downright ugly; most programmers simply ignore the problem. Those that cannot must pay a heavy performance cost, which is paid even in the most common case when the program runs on one processor. Explicit parallelism is one of the main reasons for the poor performance of Enterprise Java Beans when building data-intensive, non-OLTP applications. The Enterprise Java Beans specification is one of the several Java APIs in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. ... OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is a form of transaction processing conducted via computer network. ...

Dataflow languages promote the data to become the main concept behind any program. It may be considered odd that this is not always the case, as programs generally take in data, process it, and then feed it back out. This was especially true of older programs, and is well represented in the Unix operating system which pipes the data between small single-purpose tools. Programs in a dataflow language start with an input, perhaps the command line parameters, and illustrate how that data is used and modified. The data is now explicit, often illustrated physically on the screen as a line or pipe showing where the information flows. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... It has been suggested that Maintenance OS be merged into this article or section. ... A command line interface or CLI is a method of interacting with a computer by giving it lines of textual commands (that is, a sequence of characters) either from keyboard input or from a script. ...

Operations consist of "black boxes" with inputs and outputs, all of which are always explicitly defined. They run as soon as all of their inputs become valid, as opposed to when the program encounters them. Whereas a traditional program essentially consists of a series of statements saying "do this, now do this", a dataflow program is more like a series of workers on an assembly line, who will do their assigned task as soon as the materials arrive. This is why dataflow languages are inherently parallel; the operations have no hidden state to keep track of, and the operations are all "ready" at the same time. Modern car assembly line. ...

Dataflow programs are generally represented very differently inside the computer as well. A traditional program is just what it seems, a series of instructions that run one after the other. A dataflow program might be implemented as a big hash table instead, with uniquely identified inputs as the keys, and pointers to the code as data. When any operation completes, the program scans down the list until it finds the first operation where all of the inputs are currently valid, and runs it. When that operation finishes it will typically put data into one or more outputs, thereby making some other operation become valid. In computer science, a hash table is a data structure that speeds up searching for information by a particular aspect of that information, called a key. ...

For parallel operation only the list needs to be shared; the list itself is the state of the entire program. Thus the task of maintaining state is removed from the programmer and given to the language's runtime instead. On machines with a single processor core where an implementation designed for parallel operation would simply introduce overhead, this overhead can be removed completely by using a different runtime. In computer science, runtime or run time describes the operation of a computer program, the duration of its execution, from beginning to termination (compare compile time). ...

There are many hardware architectures oriented toward the efficient implementation of dataflow programming models. MIT's tagged token dataflow architecture was designed by Greg Papadopoulos who is now the CTO of Sun Microsystems. Greg Papadopoulos Greg Papadopoulos is the current Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Sun Microsystems. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

History

Dataflow languages were originally developed in order to make parallel programming easier. In Bert Sutherland's 1966 Ph.D. thesis, The On-line Graphical Specification of Computer Procedures^[1], Sutherland created one of the first graphical data flow programming frameworks. Subsequent data flow languages were often developed at the large supercomputer labs. One of the most popular was SISAL, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. SISAL looks like most statement-driven languages, but demands that every variable be defined only 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. William R. (Bert) Sutherland (b. ... A supercomputer is a computer that led the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... Binomial name Agave sisalana Perrine Sisal or sisal hemp is an agave Agave sisalana that yields a stiff fiber used in making rope. ... Aerial view of the lab and surrounding area. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language, multi-target compiler. ... SAC (Single Assignment C) is a strict purely functional programming language which design is focussed on the needs of numerical applications. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ...

A more radical concept is Prograph, in which programs are constructed as graphs onscreen, and variables are replaced entirely with lines linking inputs to outputs. Ironically, Prograph was originally written on the Macintosh, the only computer with a powerful enough GUI at the time, which remained single-processor until very recently. Prograph is a visual, object-oriented, dataflow, multiparadigm programming language that uses iconic symbols to represent actions to be taken on data. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ...

The most popular dataflow languages are more practical, the most famous being National Instruments LabVIEW. It was originally intended to make linking data between lab equipment easy for non-programmers, but has since become more general purpose. Another is VEE, optimized to use with data acquisition devices like digital voltmeters and oscilloscopes, and source devices like arbitrary waveform generators and power supplies. The National Instruments Campus in Austin, Texas National Instruments, or NI (NASDAQ: NATI), is a producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. ... LabVIEW (short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. ... The current version of the article or section reads like an advertisement. ...

Languages

• Cantata, a Dataflow Visual Language for image processing.
• Bioera
• Easy5
• Flowdesigner
• Flow-based programming
• FxEngine Framework
• Hartmann pipelines
• ID
• LabVIEW
• Lucid
• Marten - A commercial low-cost Mac OS X Prograph clone
• Max/Msp
• Microsoft Visual Programming Language - a component of Microsoft Robotics Studio designed for Robotics programming
• Mindscript - Open Source visualization and software development environment.
• Prograph
• Pure Data
• Informatica PowerCenter -- Data Integration product built and sold by Informatica Corporation
• Show and Tell
• Simulink
• SISAL
• VEE
• VVVV
• BMDFM Binary Modular Dataflow Machine BMDFM
• Proto Financial - A commercial dataflow visual programming language (with a focus on financial services applications)
• CogniToy MindRover - A computer game which involves programming autonomous robots.

UPIICSA IPN - Binary image Image processing is any form of information processing for which the input is an image, such as photographs or frames of video; the output is not necessarily an image, but can be for instance a set of features of the image. ... In computer science, flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of black box processes, which exchange data across predefined connections. ... A Hartmann pipeline is an extension of the Unix pipeline concept, providing for more complex paths, multiple input/output streams, and other features. ... LabVIEW (short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. ... Lucid Inc. ... Alternate meanings: MAX Max is a graphical development environment for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling74. ... Microsoft Visual Programming Language, or MVPL, is a visual programming and dataflow language developed by Microsoft for the Microsoft Robotics Studio. ... The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation. ... Robotics is the science and technology of robots, their design, manufacture, and application. ... Mindscript is a generic codeless and visual programming system. ... Prograph is a visual, object-oriented, dataflow, multiparadigm programming language that uses iconic symbols to represent actions to be taken on data. ... Pure Data with many patches open (netpd project) Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works. ... Informatica Corporation provides data integration software and services for various businesses, industries and govenment organizations, including telecommunications, health care, insurance, and financial services. ... Informatica Corporation provides data integration software and services for various businesses, industries and govenment organizations, including telecommunications, health care, insurance, and financial services. ... Simulink, running a simulation of a thermostat-controlled heating system Simulink® is a block library tool for modeling, simulating and analyzing dynamic systems. ... Binomial name Agave sisalana Perrine Sisal or sisal hemp is an agave Agave sisalana that yields a stiff fiber used in making rope. ... The current version of the article or section reads like an advertisement. ... VVVV is a graphical programming language similar to Pure Data or Max but less focused on audio. ... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

See also

• Actor model