This file contains notes for release 0.9 of ascend4, binary for Wintel. Downloading: retrieve /pub/a4_0_9_0.zip retrieve /pub/pdffiles/howto-ascend.pdf retrieve /pub/pdffiles/syntax.pdf Topics- 0 learning the modeling tools and reading more about ASCEND. 1 Installing under Win32 (95, NT4) 2 Installing under windoze 3.1.1 3 Installing under Windows98 4 Tcl/Tk used by ASCEND under Windows 5 Installing debugger version of ascend under Windows. 6 Building ASCEND under Dev Studio from its sources. 7 Modeling libraries from CMU 0) Documentation for the ASCEND language and how to use it. Howtos for mathematical modeling are available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ascend/pdfhelp.htm. Bibliography and online publications relating to ASCEND and ASCEND applications are available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ascend/ascend_documentation.htm. General information on ascend including free registration and bug report/technical support information is available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ascend All information is available in Adobe PDF format. Some information is available in alternate formats. 1) To install this software for Windows 95 or Windows NT 4: Unzip this file. If your unzip program has an option that turns folder information off and on, turn it ON. ASCEND will not work without being arranged in its folders. Find ascopt4.exe in new folder ascend4-0.9.0\ascend4\bin\, then double-click to start ascend. or right click to create a shortcut and move the shortcut to your desktop or menu folder. Do NOT move the ascopt4.exe. It will not work except from the bin directory. 2) To install this software for Windows 3.1.1: ASCEND may work if you have installed Win32s. Verify that you have win32s and then follow the instruction for installing under Win95 or WinNT4. We have not tested this theory as we have no obsolete windoze boxes. 3) To install this software for Windows98: Yawn. We do not have access to Microsoft's latest malpractice alleged to be an operating system. If you do, try installing ASCEND by following the instructions for WNT4/W95. If you succeed and ASCEND works for you, please let us know. 4) Tcl/Tk Notes: ASCEND relies on the portable GUI system from www.scriptics.com Tcl/Tk 8.0p2. The ASCEND IV zip file is entirely self-contained. You do not need to install Tk separately. ASCEND will not interfere with any other Tcl/Tk version you may have installed. 5) To install the debugger version of ascend under windows. ASCEND IV is compiled with Developer's Studio, Visual C++ 5.0, and Digital Fortran. The unoptimized executable file with debugger symbols is available. - Install the normal version of ASCEND IV. - Obtain a4debug.zip from the same download area where you obtained the normal version. - Unzip a4debug.zip. - Move the ascend4.exe that is extracted to ascend4-0.9.0/ascend4/bin. It now be next to ascopt4.exe. - Run ascend4.exe just as you would ascopt.exe. 6) Building ascend4 from the source distribution. Building ascend under Linux or other UNIX is trivial assuming you have matched ansi compliant C and F77 compilers available. The configure and make programs take care of nearly everything automagically. Under windows, life is not so simple. ASCEND IV is compiled with Developer's Studio from a single set of sources that works under all known ANSI C/C++ compilers for UNIX/X11R6 or Windows. It is in principle portable to Macintosh, though this has not been done. Because the Windows development environment is such a piece of standards non-compliant garbage, makefiles are not yet available. The configuration (.dsw/.dsp) or .mak files for Windows Developer Studio are available on request. Contact ballan@cs.cmu.edu. p 7) A variety of libraries are included in the ascend4\models\ directory. See ascend4\models\README.txt or README.html for details. Additional contributed models may be available from the ASCEND web sites above.