In the context of software architecture, data flow relates to stream processing or reactive programming.
The data-centric perspective characteristic of data flow programming promotes high-level functional specifications and simplifies formal reasoning about system components.
Jack Dennis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) pioneered the field of static dataflow architectures.
Designs that use conventional memory addresses as data dependency tags are called static dataflow machines.
This implies that the behavior of such networks can be described by a set of recursive equations, which can be solved using fixed point theory.