Actually, Win32
does have something called "named pipes"; there's a CreateNamedPipe() system call! Unfortunately, the semantics are completely different. AFAIK, there's no other native IPC mechanism in Windows that's any closer, either.
I'm not sure, but I
think that the
Cygwin folks finally got around to implementing UNIX named pipes for Windows. If you're porting UNIX apps to Windows, Cygwin is definitely worth a look.