[Ecolab-list] EcoLab 4.D25 released

[Russell S. <hp...@hp...>]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Ecolab.4.D25. This is the first
major release of EcoLab for almost 2 years, and consists of a major
effort to eliminate all known bugs in the package, prior to starting
work on EcoLab 5. There are a few new features added as well. See
http://ecolab.sourceforge.net 

Please log any problems and bugs with the sourceforge bug tracker.

EcoLab 5 represents an opportunity to redesign/refactor the package,
retaining all the good points of Ecolab 4. At this stage, no code has
been written, but it is just a concept in my mind to make this an even
better C++ ABM environment. I'd like to open up discussion with the
modelling community to see what people would like. I'm particularly
interested to hear from people interested in using C++, and who use
EcoLab now, or have tried EcoLab and found it wanting, just what it is
you'd like in a C++ modelling package.

My preliminary thoughts at this stage are:

* Make a more uniform syntax for declaring objects acessible from the
  scripting interface: At present we have NEWCOMMAND, make_model and
  TCL_TYPE for static declarations and Tcl_Obj for dynamic creation.

* Improve the handling of arguments to be more like native C++
  (instead of the current TCL_args)

* Generalise scripting to other languages/environment. Environments
  I'd like to target as well as TCL are Perl, Python and
  Java. Possibly use SWIG to provide support for the range of
  environments supported by that package.

* Integrate EcoLab engine into a package like RePast to allow RePast
  visualisation tools to work with EcoLab compiled models in
  interactive mode. Batch processing will still be done independently
  of RePast.

Cheers

-- 

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A/Prof Russell Standish                  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics                         	 
UNSW SYDNEY 2052         	         hp...@hp...
Australia                                http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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