Z-level Programming Language is an

array programming language In computer science, array programming refers to solutions that allow the application of operations to an entire set of values at once. Such solutions are commonly used in scientific and engineering settings. Modern programming languages that sup ...

designed to replace C and C++ programming languages in engineering and scientific applications. Because its design goal was to obtain

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

high performance, ZPL programs run fast on both

sequential In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is call ...

and

parallel computer Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different for ...

s. Highly-parallel ZPL programs are simple and easy to write because it exclusively uses

implicit parallelism In computer science, implicit parallelism is a characteristic of a programming language that allows a compiler or interpreter to automatically exploit the parallelism inherent to the computations expressed by some of the language's constructs ...

. Originally called Orca C, ZPL was designed and implemented during 1993–1995 by the Orca Project of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

Details

ZPL uses the array abstraction to implement a data parallel programming model. This is the reason why ZPL achieves such good performance: having no

parallel directives Parallel may refer to: Mathematics * Parallel (geometry), two lines in the Euclidean plane which never intersect * Parallel (operator), mathematical operation named after the composition of electrical resistance in parallel circuits Science a ...

or other forms of explicit parallelism, ZPL exploits the operational trait that when aggregate computations are described in terms of arrays, many scalar operations must be (implicitly) performed to implement the array operations. This ''implied'' computation can be automatically allotted to different processors to achieve concurrency: Parallelism arises from the semantics of the array operations. ZPL is translated into a conventional

abstract syntax tree An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal ...

representation on which

program analysis In computer science, program analysis is the process of analyzing the behavior of computer programs regarding a property such as correctness, robustness, safety and liveness. Program analysis focuses on two major areas: program optimization an ...

and program optimizations are performed.

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the ...

code is generated as the object code. This C program (which is machine independent because it implements certain operations in abstract form) is then compiled using the native C compiler on the

target machine Target may refer to: Warfare and shooting * Shooting target, used in marksmanship training and various shooting sports ** Bullseye (target), the goal one for which one aims in many of these sports ** Aiming point, in field artiller ...

with custom libraries optimized to the specific platform. The creators of ZPL were: Brad Chamberlain, Sung-Eun Choi, E Christopher Lewis, Calvin Lin, Jason Secosky, Larry Snyder, and W. Derrick Weathersby with assistance from Ruth Anderson, A.J. Bernheim, Marios Dikaiakos, George Forman, and Kurt Partridge.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Array programming languages Concurrent programming languages Programming languages created in 1993

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See also

References

External links