QUANTI: A framework for simulations.

Software reuse and simulations are becoming important issues in both software development and scientific research. Conceptual structures recur in simulations and can be usefully parameterized and made generic to assist researchers and practitioners in moving away from handcrafted one-of-a-kind simulations toward generic solutions for families of simulations. This work is an exposition on the creation and use of a novel, domain-level definition framework (QUANTI) that defines a new computational paradigm unifying a philosophical pragmatic view of the physical universe with fundamental scientific and computational ideas so that cognitive assumptions implicit in each mirror one another. A large class of simulations that involves entities interacting in spaces, constraining and binding their interaction, is delineated for the practical purpose of creating a foundation for future programming languages where simulations of that class may be directly expressed, and which is readily and efficiently implemented on the underlying platforms. The framework is described in full, including a comprehensive set of domain abstractions, an object-oriented coherent design, and a prototype implementation. The wide range of applicability of QUANTI is then demonstrated by simulations which have produced novel and competitive results in two widely differing disciplines, biomolecular computing and natural language processing.