[Swarm-Support] Re: using swarm

[Bill Northcott]

> I am an Italian MacOSX user and I am attempting to make run Swarm on my iMac, following your instrunctions (published on http://banking.web.unsw.edu.au/w.northcott/). Can you suggest me how can I  begin my work? I would like to find the solution of the software in order to learn which is its structure. Should I use Terminal, or a compiler?

Swarm consists of a bunch of software libraries which provide interfaces in both Objective-C and Java.

In order to create working models based on them, there are certain skills you will need including at least:
An understanding of UNIX shells (the Terminal) and UNIX file system syntax.
The basics of writing, compiling and linking a program, including the use of libraries.

There are various resources, tutorials etc. linked from the main Swarm web site and also Paul Johnson's site at KU. (http://www.ku.edu/~pauljohn/).  See how the example models are written.  Apple provides many resources relevant to the Objective-C language and the gnu compiler which are used by Swarm.  However, the former concentrate on the use of Apple's Cocoa libraries, which use a rather different style to Swarm.  You should register on Apple's developer site which is free.  All these resources will assume that you have a basic familiarity with C.  For this there are huge numbers of books available.  For me the best is still the original bible by the creators of C- "The C Programming Language", Kernighan and Ritchie.  There are several books now available about using the UNIX facilities of MacOS X.

If you have followed the instructions in the ReadMe files provided on the download site and in the MacOS X packages, you will have a working programming environment supporting C, C++, Objective-C and Swarm.  Any of the tutorial exercises provided in the resources above should work for you.

Happy learning
Bill Northcott