There is also such a thing as a spread pointer, which is an alternate form of a global pointer. The programmer has full control over array layout.
Communications are explicit operators in the language.
VFCS compiles both HPF and Vienna Fortran to the same internal program. In this language the basic notion is distributed collection . The programmer describes the distribution of a collection over the memory hierarchy and over the array of machines. Operations can be performed in parallel on a collection. One goal is to allow all HPL's to interoperate with each other.