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Summary: 26
Chapter 2
REGIONS AND THE ZPL LANGUAGE
This chapter describes the ZPL language, concentrating on the role of regions in its
design. To make this discussion both readable and precise, some language concepts are
introduced informally at first and are then reconsidered with increased formality as the
chapter progresses. While this format would not be appropriate for a language reference
manual, it is designed to provide an appropriate mixture of clarity and precision for this
presentation.
Note that this chapter focuses on the sequential interpretation of ZPL, largely ignoring
the parallel implications of regions and the language itself. Since parallelism is inherent in
the definition and use of regions, this will leave some questions unanswered at the chapter's
conclusion. These questions will be addressed in the following chapter, which describes the
parallel implications of regions.
This chapter's description of ZPL is meant to provide a general overview of the lan-
guage. For a more complete description, refer to the ZPL Programmer's Guide and the
ZPL web page [Sny99, ZPL01].
The structure of this chapter is as follows. Sections 2.12.14 describe the ZPL language,
including such fundamental concepts as regions, arrays, and array operators. Section 2.15
illustrates ZPL's use in a number of small sample applications that will be used in subse-
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