Improving Information for Social Policy Decisions -- The Uses of Microsimulation Modeling: Volume II, Technical Papers (1991)
Chapter: Object-Oriented Computing
Data Desk,76 while not following a strict construction kit approach, provides very effective tools for the construction of data subsets. Combined with powerful multiple views into data, it allows construction and experimentation at the data level similar in feel to the above programs.
These programs and similar products all use a construction kit paradigm77 to model a real world environment on the computer. All of the programs are successful, for reasons in addition to sharing the construction kit paradigm:
Each program uses a visual interface, with the object and environmental building blocks taken from the real world objects and environment being modeled.
The objects in each program look and behave like their real world counterparts.
The programs provide a highly interactive environment within which a user can iterate back and forth rapidly and effectively between designing the model and activating it.
The graphical user interface is a very important part of an environment based on a construction kit paradigm. Generally, models are effectively viewed visually as a set of interlinked components, where the linkages can be quite complex.78 Allowing a user to manipulate these components, or objects, in visual space provides an effective way to define more complex structures on the basis of simpler ones.79
Object-Oriented Computing
Within the past several years, programming language developments have increasingly embraced the notion of object-oriented programming. The basic notion in such languages is that of a design with objects that receive messages as inputs and produce other messages as outputs. Existing objects can be used to define new, more complex objects, which inherit various properties of the objects underlying them. The current shift toward object-oriented languages is
