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The intelligent agent object (IAO) system is a multi‐paradigm development environment which can be used to create intelligent agent systems for manufacturing or other domains. The IAO system was developed from the rule‐based object (RBO) system which is a programming environment integrating both the rule‐based and object‐oriented paradigms. Propagation‐oriented programming, access‐oriented programming and group‐oriented programming are among the extensions included in the IAO system. Its most unusual contribution is the propagation‐oriented programming paradigm which is not found in most systems. A key application is the messenger inferencing structure which is a user‐extendable framework supporting multiple knowledge representation, meta‐inference control, and distributed inference. This allows the IAO system to go beyond predicate logic based production rule programming. New developments are also introduced for access‐oriented programming. The IAO system can be used to develop integrated manufacturing systems such as the prototype automated guided vehicle planning and control system, which is briefly described.

The process of creating complex models often requires different modelling methods and tools to be integrated. This paper provides a concise description of an object‐oriented environment for creating composite models. The proposed approach is based on using simulation abstractions as basic model building blocks. The basic environment is built up of a Prolog interpreter, SIMLIB and object‐oriented Petri nets.

OOP, GUI, AND LIBRARY WORKSTATION SOFTWARE. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) recently awarded large grants to the University of California and Pennsylvania State University jointly to link the massive bibliographic databases of both institutions together, in spite of varying hardware platforms and geography. At the workstation level, the University of California will create interfaces based on DECwindows, a form of the X Windows interface. The online bibliographic systems of Berkeley and Perm State handle 200,000 to 300,000 requests per week, and currently run on an IBM 3090 in California and a DEC VAX 9000 system in Pennsylvania. This interest in bibliographic interfaces has grown rapidly in the last few years thanks to hardware developments putting more computing muscle on the desktop for librarians, their programmers, and ultimately their patrons. Recent manifestations of graphic interfaces have appeared in many libraries as HyperCard shells built as intermediaries to mainframe bibliographic software. This grant by DEC indicates that this sort of work on graphic interfaces in libraries and the system offices on campuses has not gone without notice by major vendors. With the recent explosion in the number of graphic interfaces, it is important to review these tools and their basis in object oriented programming (OOP).

There is a widely available object oriented (OO) programming language that is usually overlooked in the OO analysis, OO design, OO programming literature. It was designed with most of the features of languages like C++, Eiffel, and Smalltalk. It has extensive and efficient numerical abilities including concise array and matrix handling, like Matlab®. In addition, it is readily extended to massively parallel machines and is backed by an international ISO and ANSI standard. The language is Fortran 90 (and Fortran 95). When the explosion of books and articles on OOP began appearing in the early 1990s many of them correctly disparaged Fortran 77 (F77) for its lack of object oriented abilities and data structures. However, then and now many authors fail to realize that the then new Fortran 90 (F90) standard established a well‐planned object oriented programming language while maintaining a full backward compatibility with the old F77 standard. F90 offers strong typing, encapsulation, inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, and other features important to object oriented programming. This paper will illustrate several of these features that are important to engineering computation using OOP.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance to librarians about whether to keep or withdraw books on pre-Internet computer programming languages.

For each of the programming languages considered, this article provides historical background and an assessment of current academic library collection needs.

Many older languages (COBOL, FORTRAN, C, Lisp, Prolog, and Ada) are still in use and need reliable sources available for reference. Additionally, books about obsolete languages have educational value due to their influence on the development on newer languages such as C++ and Java.

This information will be useful to academic librarians who want to make the best choices about keeping or withdrawing computer programming books.

Most librarians responsible for managing computer science collections do not have a computer programming background, so they do not know which older languages are still important.

Although the rapid spread of information processing technology is widely expected to have dramatic social impacts, the argument most commonly advanced for this position, a simple appeal to the speed of technical progress, is quite weak. Any more compelling case must identify the attributes of information technology which distinguish it from other, less disruptive, technical innovations. One such is informa‐tion technology's combination of high reactivity, coupled with a basic lack of understanding of its underlying conceptual structure on the part of those who have to adapt to it. This lack of understanding not only implies that users will become alienated from their environment, but also presents practical difficulties to applications of information technology such as office automation. This analysis makes the basic cognitive skills, such as procedural reasoning, underlying any effective use of information processing devices a topic of central concern. However, neither the difficulty nor the importance of these skills are widely appreciated. Most of the techniques which have been proposed to facilitate the use of complex, programmed devices are simply incommensurate in scope with the problem. A Gendanken analysis of programming is advanced to indicate why this is so and to serve as the basis for an agenda of cognitive science research.

This paper presents several research issues associated with the PNtalk language that is based on a certain kind of object‐oriented Petri nets (OOPNs) and intended mainly for modelling, prototyping, and verifying concurrent and distributed applications. The paper reviews the main concepts of PNtalk and OOPNs followed by a proposal of a system allowing prototypes based on PNtalk to be run in a distributed way. Furthermore, the first step made towards state spaces‐based formal analysis and verification over PNtalk OOPNs are also briefly mentioned in the paper.

As manufacturing systems change from island of automation to enterprise‐wise integration, object‐oriented database and database management systems have many superior features to meet the new requirements. Based on the comparison with relational databases, this paper discusses the selections and characteristics of the object‐oriented database and database management systems (OODBMS) in manufacturing and summarizes the current studies and applications. It helps managers to choose appropriate OODBMS products based on the degree of complexity of their firm’s entity and data items. It provides a direction for future research.

Hereward College is the UK National Residential College for students with physical and sensory disabilities. It offers a full range of further education courses combined with study support and 24‐hour care and medical support. It provides 120 residential places for disabled students and 300 day places for disabled or able‐bodied students. A range of teaching strategies is employed including open learning through the Supported Self Study Centre, which has all day tutor support.