The applicatations that you listed primarily deal with physical systems, so they are very well suited to OO, where an object can be used to represent some real-world thing. Molecules, machine parts, elastic elements, or magnetic domains are all things that have behavior, state and identity, so they are perfect cantidates for objects.
But, the physical simulations are also iterative, so the code will have a loop, and loops feel like procedural code. That is not a conflict -- you are allowed loops in OO code! Your simulations would likely have a loop that iterated over time, space, temperature, or energy, and for each iteration, you would examine the state of each object in the system and call some methods on them to simulate their behavior.
For instance, if you were building a solar system simulator, each planet would be an object, with properties for position in space and mass. Your loop would iterate over time and over each planet. For each planet in a time step, calculate the force on the planet due to other planets, and move the planet in response to the forces. ( More likely you would use an adaptive iterator and use another loop to do several iteration steps per planet per timestep. )
The benefit of OO here is that it makes it easy to organize your code and move simple things like F=Ma, 3d vector manipulations and your Runge-Kutta integrator out of the main algorithm.
Plus, your code is easier to read, since you don't nned a lof of comments for things like planet.mass() or planet.move(vector)
OO makes physical simulations much easier because it allows you to organize the program according to the physical structure of the system, and those object remove a lot of basic code from the algorithm, so the algorithm becomes simpler and easier to work with.
I have built simulations for packet networks, simulated anealing, Ising glasses, Newtonian mechanics and finite element analysis in both OO and procedural style, and OO worked so well that I would never consider writing any of them in procedural style again.
Yes -- it has been done. The product is called ClearCase. The product has been bought and sold many times, and is now owned by Rational. www.clearcase.com will get you a link inside Rational's site.
ClearCase works very well, but being infinitely flexible, it is also very complex and fairly slow. At my last company, misuse and misunderstanding lead to several disasters that lost several weeks of work -- precisely the event that the product is supposed to prevent.
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The applicatations that you listed primarily deal with physical systems, so they are very well suited to OO, where an object can be used to represent some real-world thing. Molecules, machine parts, elastic elements, or magnetic domains are all things that have behavior, state and identity, so they are perfect cantidates for objects.
But, the physical simulations are also iterative, so the code will have a loop, and loops feel like procedural code. That is not a conflict -- you are allowed loops in OO code! Your simulations would likely have a loop that iterated over time, space, temperature, or energy, and for each iteration, you would examine the state of each object in the system and call some methods on them to simulate their behavior.
For instance, if you were building a solar system simulator, each planet would be an object, with properties for position in space and mass. Your loop would iterate over time and over each planet. For each planet in a time step, calculate the force on the planet due to other planets, and move the planet in response to the forces. ( More likely you would use an adaptive iterator and use another loop to do several iteration steps per planet per timestep. ) The benefit of OO here is that it makes it easy to organize your code and move simple things like F=Ma, 3d vector manipulations and your Runge-Kutta integrator out of the main algorithm. Plus, your code is easier to read, since you don't nned a lof of comments for things like planet.mass() or planet.move(vector)
OO makes physical simulations much easier because it allows you to organize the program according to the physical structure of the system, and those object remove a lot of basic code from the algorithm, so the algorithm becomes simpler and easier to work with.
I have built simulations for packet networks, simulated anealing, Ising glasses, Newtonian mechanics and finite element analysis in both OO and procedural style, and OO worked so well that I would never consider writing any of them in procedural style again.
Yes -- it has been done. The product is called ClearCase. The product has been bought and sold many times, and is now owned by Rational. www.clearcase.com will get you a link inside Rational's site.
ClearCase works very well, but being infinitely flexible, it is also very complex and fairly slow. At my last company, misuse and misunderstanding lead to several disasters that lost several weeks of work -- precisely the event that the product is supposed to prevent.
I am creating a libary that implements the iCal RFCs, including iTIP, iMIP, iRIP and CAP. The web page for the libary is:
http://softwarestudio.org/libical/inde x.html
I am also working with a small team on a CS server and web-based client. These projects are in early design, and their web pages are at:
http://softwarestudio.org/Free Association/index.html
You can address any comments or questions to me at eric@softwarestudio.org