winfave@dutrun.UUCP (Alexander Verbraeck) (06/08/90)
SCRIPTIC: Easy event-driven and parallel programming in extended C May 1990 -- Den Haag, Netherlands based company Delftware Technology B.V. announces its new product Scriptic, an extension to the C programming language. Scriptic has been designed to simplify the development of various kinds of software, by offering parallelism and event-drivenness. Programmers will find rapid solutions for problems concerning simulations, user interfaces, animations, games and language parsers. Scriptic is a "programmer friendly" language, due to its high conceptual level. Company founder Andre van Delft developed Scriptic basing it on a theory called Process Algebra, which is a simple way of describing processes. The result has among others the expressiveness of the products Yacc, Occam and Prolog. Language features: * Upwards compatible with C and compatible dialects such as C++ and C with embedded SQL. Existing program libraries remain accessible as usual. * New function-like refinement construct: script. Improved parameter mechanism offering pattern matching. * Simple symbols for basic program structures such as sequence ( ; ), choice ( | ), normal parallelism ( , ), and-parallelism ( & ), or-parallelism ( + ). * Powerful iteration constructs, customizable by programmers, and reusable from libraries. Examples: WHILE, UNTIL, FOR, TIMES, EXIT, MANY, SOME. Each iterator applies to sequence, choice, parallelism etc. Multiple exit points in loops are supported. * Process launching, like in Unix, and inter-process communication. * C code fragments can be specified within scripts and have several attributes: * priority - same notion as in operating systems * preference - determines the evaluation order of choices * duration - especially for use in simulations * eventtype - cooperating with windowing managers for input handling etc. The Scriptic programmer's package comes with a preprocessor (about 120 k) and runtime support (about 35 k). Execution efficiency: a shop simulation with 1000 'customers' queuing for service by one of 10 available 'servers' takes 5 seconds (Sun Sparc Station 1). Platforms Supported: PC+MS/DOS, Apple Macintosh (US$ 349); Sun-3, Sun-4 (US$ 2450). Prices are valid until 1 August 1990. Porting to other systems possible upon request. Demo packages are available for PC+MS/DOS and Sun-4 (US $ 44). Further information can be obtained from: Delftware Technology B.V. Tel.: (31)70-3558739 Gentsestraat 165 or: (31)71-213727 2587 HP Den Haag Fax: (31)71-275819 The Netherlands E-Mail: DELFT@fwi.uva.nl