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Defining Dynamical Systems Using the Parser Window

The parser allows the user to define a vector field or mapping in a simple textual format as opposed to C code language. This may be extended to a full description of the dynamical system by defining initial conditions and default ranges for the variables and parameters, declaring variables periodic on a specified interval, and defining auxiliary functions. Once a dynamical system has been defined in a text window, it may be interpreted and examined within DsTool.

The capabilities of the parser will be described by considering a number of examples. These examples are included as text files in the directory $DSTOOL/data/parser/, and may be loaded into the parser editor window.

While the parser is intended to be an easy-to-use general purpose tool, for extensive and/or more sophisticated calculations with a vector field or mapping, a full C-code model file should be compiled into DsTool. See section 4.2 for more information on this process. This is primarily because:

  1. Computations with the parsed dynamical system will incur additional overhead since the code for evaluation of the dynamical system is not compiled.
  2. Certain features cannot be defined by the parser. In addition, they will not be included into the automatically generated C code, and have to be added by hand. See section 3.1.8 on limitations for more details.



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2005-10-26