1. An apparatus for governing the execution of operations upon data in a digital processing device, said apparatus including: a pipeline including a plurality of interconnected stages, each stage being dedicated to one of a plurality of data operations executed on data in a digital processing device; a pipeline input for receiving a plurality of digital control words into the pipeline for governing the execution of the data operations as the digital control words progress through the pipeline; each one of the digital control words including control information dedicated to at least one selected operation of the data operations and further including mapping information indicating each selected data operation to which the control information, of said one of the control words, is dedicated; each one of the digital control words further governing the performance of the selected data operation when said one of the control words resides in a particular one of the pipeline stages dedicated to the selected data operation; means coupling the pipeline input and a pipeline exit to each one of the pipeline stages to enable one each of the control words to occupy only selected ones of the pipeline stages as said one of the control word progresses through the pipeline; and a control word routing means for selectively and individually routing said one of the control words through the pipeline via only selected pipeline stages, the selected pipeline stages for said one of the control words depending upon the mapping information of said one of the control words.