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6

Extrinsic Program Units (Section )

Because HPF is designed as a high-level machine-independent language, there are certain operations that are difficult or impossible to express directly. For example, an application may benefit from finely-tuned systolic communications on certain machines; HPF's global address space does not express this well. HPF defines the Extrinsic mechanism to facilitate interfacing with procedures written in other paradigms, such as explicit message-passing subroutine libraries or in other languages, such as C.