dr1b@CIVE.RI.CMU.EDU (Dionysis Rigopoulos) (04/27/88)
I have recently read the report on ThingLab (Borning 1979) and found it very interesting. I would very much appreciate pointers to papers, code, work, persons in the major ThingLab area (applications derived from ThingLab or similar to it in constraint satisfaction, part-whole hierarchies, interactive design systems using graphics); also pointers to work on applied CAD (especially in structural and/or architectural design). -- Dionysis R. Rigopoulos dr1b@cive.ri.cmu.edu -- Dionysis R. Rigopoulos dr1b@cive.ri.cmu.edu
pieter@prls.UUCP (Pieter van der Meulen) (04/28/88)
In article <1544@pt.cs.cmu.edu> dr1b@CIVE.RI.CMU.EDU (Dionysis Rigopoulos) writes: > >I have recently read the report on ThingLab (Borning 1979) and found it very >interesting. I would very much appreciate pointers to papers, code, work, >persons in the major ThingLab area (applications derived from ThingLab or >similar to it in constraint satisfaction, part-whole hierarchies, >interactive design systems using graphics); also pointers to work on applied >CAD (especially in structural and/or architectural design). > At Philips Research Labs in Sunnyvale (California) we designed INSIST (an INteractive SImulator in SmallTalk) for VLSI design. It is highly interactive and graphical; similar to ThingLab. INSIST however is event-driven and has a strong notion of "Time". Like in ThingLab you can connect a generator with a 2 and one with a 3 to and adder and see the result immediately at the output of the adder (like Fig.2 in the OOPSLA'87 proceeding, p.51). In other words, circuits entered do not have to go through the traditional "edit-compile-simulate" cyclus, because simulation (event handling) has been merged with editing (control activity). We used INSIST to simulate a RISC chip design (with three levels of hierarchy and more than 50 simulating Modules). Unfortunately, the package is not commercially available. More information is available though: Proceedings of the OOPSLA '87, p.366 Smalltalk-80 newsletter no.13 (from ParcPlace Systems) Proceedings of the ICCD '88 (to be published in October)