A Technical Overview of lattice

This chapter gives a broad overview of lattice, briefly describing the most important features shared by all high-level functions. Some of the topics covered are somewhat technical, but they are important motifs in the“big picture” view of lattice, and it would hinder rather than help to introduce them later at arbitrary points in the book. For readers that are new to lattice, it is recommended that they give this chapter a cursory overview and move on to the subsequent chapters. Each of the remaining chapters in Part I can be read, for the most part, directly after Chapter 1, although some advanced examples do require some groundwork laid out in this chapter. This nonlinear flow is inconvenient for those new to lattice, but it is somewhat inevitable; one should not expect to learn all the complexities of Trellis graphics in a first reading.