
(..CA in SCARLET)	Contents	Index	(Arrangements)

2. Common Basis of RDL and SDL

Within the next three chapters, we will introduce the reader to the two most important tools for writing programs which will simulate a given cellular automaton (CA). First of all we will recall the essential parts of a CA:

There are several reasons for separating the declaration of the retina and the initial configuration on the one hand, from that of the neighbourhood and the local rule on the other hand, in SCARLET. This proceeding allows us, for instance, to combine different "matching" automaton parts to get a complete CA, later. "Matching" means that the dimension of the retina and the state set must be the same in both definitons to permit a combination. We are going to discuss this later.

For the design of a CA, SCARLET provides two special programming languages: RDL (= Retina Definition Language) and SDL (= Sigma Definition Language) - it is probably easy to guess which language belongs to which task?!
Now you will perhaps say: "Am I really forced to learn two languages to create a simple CA??" That is right, indeed, but the reader will soon detect that they are not very different at all, on the contrary: Most of the basic concepts are used in both languages RDL and SDL. We go even further as to simply speak of SCARLET, if we mean both, RDL and SDL. In addition, readers, well acquainted with C, will soon notice that there exist similar or even identical concepts in SCARLET. Nevertheless we will give a (more or less detailed) description of all of them. Finally SCARLET is, because of its special task, not as large as other general purpose languages and, therefore, easier to learn!


(..CA in SCARLET)	Contents	Index	(Arrangements)