 FBP thus exhibits what Raoul de Campo and Nate Edwards of IBM Research have termed configurable modularity.Information Packets or IPs are allocated in what might be called "IP space" (just as Linda's tuples are allocated in "tuple space"), and have a well-defined lifetime until they are disposed of and their space is reclaimed - in FBP this must be an explicit action on the part of an owning process.IPs traveling across a given connection (actually it is their "handles" that travel) constitute a "stream", which is generated and consumed asynchronously - this concept thus has similarities to the lazy cons concept described in the 1976 article by Friedman and Wise.