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About - Superbase Scientific Overview: Superbase Scientific is a unique simulation tool that allows you to simulate real life problems under full programming control. You can, for example, model physical processes mathematically from the output stored in a Superbase database, simulate chaotic behaviour, examine the behaviour of dynamical systems governed by differential equations over time, and view 3D objects in perspective. Features, such as numerical integration, differentiation, summation and matrix multiplication will reduce the calculations in your application to just a few lines of transparent code. Numeric output: It should be noted that Superbase Scientific is not a computer algebra system. This is to say that it produces numerical rather than formulaic output, which is generally what is eventually required in any application anyway. The great strengths of Superbase Scientific are the powerful and easy-to-use Super Basic Language (SBL), which is an object-oriented language similar to Visual Basic, the form-based environment allowing the programmer to choose how output is displayed, and the ease with which applications can be linked to databases. Usage and Applications: It is misleading to think of 'scientific' in Superbase Scientific as having a narrow academic meaning. Superbase Scientific is as well suited to the calculation of interest payments or generating a perspective view of furniture as it is to modelling the gravity well of a planetary system. An example of some of the new features contained in this unique software that can be used by the non- scientists to solve scientific problems is the numerical integration methods, called Integrate( ). Unlike integration encountered in mathematical text books, which acts on a symbolic function to produce a formula for the answer, Superbase’s numerical integration is given a formula and a range over which to integrate it, and produces the result as a number. A good reason to use a numerical rather than symbolic integration is that quite often in a real application a function that is being summed or integrated is not easily integrated symbolically, such as one which has discontinuities. Also, it is the actual value of an integration that the application will require, rather than some output formula. Ease of Use… Consider an application designed to manage the consumption of some metered resource, such as electricity or a telephone connection. Such resources are often charged at different rates depending on the time of day, or the day of the week. In this case suppose that the charge rate is held in variables w%, p% and o%, where w% is the cost per hour at weekends and p% and o% are the 'peak' rate charge (9am to 5pm) and the off-peak rates respectively. The start of any particular use of this resource (a telephone call, for example) could be measured as s% hours since the beginning of the week (so 12:30 pm Thursday would be 84.50) and the duration would be measured in hours, d%. Calculating the cost of this particular telephone call could be implemented as a complex series of IF statements, where the call is divided into blocks of one call rate, the length of each block being calculated, and then the total of all the costs being summed at the end. Alternatively the single expression: Integrate("IF (t% > 120,w%,IF(ABS((t% MOD 24) - 13) < 4,p%,o%))","t%",s%,s% + d%) gives the cost of the call. This simple calculation will hold true whenever the call starts and whatever the length of the call; whether the call lasts one minute or a thousand hours. Other features of Superbase Scientific have similar real-life uses. It is not obvious how vectors and matrices relate to a business application, but their use can greatly simplify operations previously done in nested loops, or with complex trigonometric arithmetic. Graphic presentation… It is always nice to have some graphics as part of an application's user interface. An application, that manages the design of an object, a bridge say, will help the user if a three-dimensional representation of the object can be viewed and manipulated by the user. A developer is likely to hold the key dimensions of such an object as Cartesian coordinates, even if they are called width, height and depth rather than x, y and z. It may be daunting for some programmers to convert such coordinate based data into a view of the object from say 30 degrees above the horizontal from a north-westerly direction, yet mathematically it is trivial – just a couple of rotations are required. If the key coordinates of an object are stored in a matrix, then a single matrix multiplication is required for each rotation, and the results can be displayed on a form by taking just the x and y components of the result. The act of ignoring the z component is actually performing a projection from normal 3D space onto the x-y plane. Scaling the diagram to a different size is also a single matrix multiplication operation, so the complete process of converting a set of three dimensional coordinates to a rotated, scaled and projected set of two dimensional points can be performed in one short SBL statement. Statistics… Superbase Scientific also provides functions that give the same information as statistical data for normally distributed populations. In general one will know whether or not statistical functionality is required in an application, and for most applications it is not needed. However for those applications that do use statistics the provision of built-in statistical functions could save countless hours of either programming to calculate these values, or of searching through third party products trying to find one which gives the required functionality in a readily accessible way. This is in fact the essence of what Superbase Scientific gives the programmer; there is no ground-breaking science involved, just the provision in a user-friendly way of basic scientific functionality that empowers the modellers and ambitious application developers to introduce smarter data handling and presentation into their work.
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