The first clear statement of the ‘pipeline dataflow’ was given by Conway (1963) more than twenty years ago. The use of dataflow as a programming or program-structuring technique has been developed by a number of workers, including McIlroy (1968), Kahn and MacQueen (1977) and Yourdon and Constantine (1979). In 1974 Gilles Kahn made an extremely important discovery [see Kahn (1974)], namely that the behavior of a pure pipeline functional net is exactly described by the fixed point of a corresponding set of equations. [Faustini (1972) established the validity of the “Kahn principle” for a very general operational model.] Kahn’s work stimulated a further interest in the theoretical aspect of dataflow, mainly in the problem of extending his approach to handle nets with nonfunctional nodes.
"Lucid, the Dataflow Programming Language."

















