Andre Van Delft

Introduction Computing in scientific and engineering areas often deals with manipulating numbers that represent physical entities, such as durations, weights, and forces. A common source of errors in scientific computing involves processing numbers that represent different kinds of entities, or that are related to different units, and utilizing the result for additional computation. A number is referred to as dimensioned when it relates to a specific entity such as distance, time, or temperature, and the number implies a particular unit of measure. A dimensionless number, also known as a nondimensional parameter, is a ratio of physical properties and conditions of such a nature that the resulting number has no defining unit of weight, duration, and so on. There have been several attempts to add support for handling dimensioned numbers to programming languages. The ... (more)

Scriptic: Doing the Processes in Java

Introduction Scriptic is an experimental extension to the Java language. Why is this new language on top on another brand new one? What problems does it solve? Java is a big step forward in programming, but like many other languages, it falls short in two areas: user interaction and parallelism. This is because it mainly supports the traditional paradigm of sequential actions controlled by deterministic constructs. Scriptic tries to improve on Java by adding explicit support for parallelism and non-deterministic choice. Example: The Game of Life Take the game of Life as an example.... (more)