Re: Data Directed Program Execution

Gene wrote:
You may be thinking of dataflow architectures, which were a big
research topic in the 80s. It's an elegant idea with lots of intuitive
appeal. But to my knowledge, no one ever made it work very well, at
least as a hardware architecture for general computing. Some of the
ideas were eventually employed in data structures for highly optimizing
compilers.

Modern microprocessors that use out-of-order execution are in many ways
dataflow machines. They make the transition in hardware between
control flow and data flow in their scheduling logic, though only over
a few tens of machine instructions.

Compilers certainly use the ideas.

.