Pipes And Filters

A pattern (PatternOrientedSoftwareArchitectureOne) for composing independent computations which has the advantage of making other processes look vaguely like file streams.

PipesAndFilters is the metaphor behind the Distributed Feature Composition that PamelaZave? http://www.research.att.com/~pamela/dfc.html and MichaelJackson propose for telephony and multimedia services. It is applied in their Village Telephone System.

Functional programming in the PointFree? style (using function composition rather than variables) is somewhat related. However, everything is written back to front (the function that operates on the data first is the rightmost, not the leftmost one). (Rather like conventional operator notation in quantum mechanics, then....)