Design of the Language
It is a procedural language, i.e., the user writes
procedures or functions, like in Pascal or C/C++. In
contrast to these languages the declaration of variables is not
necessary in order to preserve the character of an interpreter.
Furthermore, variables can be collected in structures, so
that it is possible to hold common information of a data set in a
single data object. Of course, all the features of an high-level language
like recursion, local variables, loops, and conditional execution are
available.
Hard- and Software requirements
Internally the data are represented in C++ classes and all numerical
algorithms, the administration of the symbol tables and of the flow
control, and finally the most parts of the graphics are implemented in
C++, too. XploRe is developed on and for Solaris 2 and
Linux 1.2 using X11 and the Motif widget set. Because only standard
tools are involved in the development, the installation on other
UNIX-like environments should be possible without major difficulties.
Network facilities
The help
system is available in HTML and can be used with a common WWW browser.
With Java applets the user can also have direct access to XploRe. These applets
will generate a full GUI, where even the local generation of graphics
is possible. That means, that with a Java including WWW browser a
full XploRe session can be opened. Furthermore
XploRe is used in the
MMM (model management for economic processes)
project within the Sonderforschungsbereich 373
at the Humboldt-University as
method server beside MatLab, Mathematica etc.
Briefly, this project implements a method based
extension of WWW and is controlled with browsers like
Mosaic, Netscape etc.
The development is a joined project of Swetlana Schmelzer (graphics and graphical user interface), Sigbert Klinke (internal class concept, numerical algorithms), and Thomas Kötter (language design and implementation, Java interface). It has been initiated and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Härdle. Additionally numerous statisticians and econometricians have contributed procedures and libraries written in XploRe.