[Alan Anderson]

Ether, I'm still not sure you've got an appropriate context for the way you're trying to understand things. A lot of the questions you ask are fine from a procedural point of view, but that's not really relevant to how a LabVIEW programmer should be looking at it.

This is a data flow language. Each function runs as soon as all of its inputs are available, and provides its outputs when it is finished. Wires carry data from one function to another, and it is the flow of data which determines which functions can run next. Groups of functions collected inside a case or while or other block must all finish before the block is satisfied. That's all you need to know in order to understand the 5ms periodic loop example.