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Package: ThingLab
Last updated at 11:02 am UTC on 11 November 2006
mergeMe into ThingLab

ThingLab is a graphical constraint system by Alan Borning built in the 1970's.

It has been ported to Squeak. And may soon be brought up to modern standards by Reinier van Loon.

Reinier has put Alan Borning's Xerox report on the web. For links to the report and sources see: ThingLab.

Abstract



ThingLab is a system that provides an object-oriented environment for building simulations. Within this environment, part-whole and inheritance hierarchies are used to describe the structure of a simulation, while constraints are employed as a way of describing the relations among its parts.

One of the principal goals of this research has been to design and implement a language that helps the user describe complex simulations easily. Constraints are a particularly important tool for dealing with complexity, because they allow the user to specify independently all the relations to be maintained, leaving it up to the system to plan exactly how the constraints are to be satisfied.

Ted Kaehler.