[GRASS-user] Simulation in grass 6

[Hamish]

Rainer M. Krug wrote:

> I am planning to write a spatial simulation model, simulating the spread 
> of alien species on a landscape scale by using grass.
> My question how I should write the simulation model, i.e. in which 
> scripting language. I am using Linux and have quite a bit of experience 
> with R, so I thought that R (together with spgrass6) would be a nice 
> scripting language to write the simulation and sending the grass 
> commands through to grass, because it offers me quite a bit more 
> concerning strtucturing on the modelling side then using a normal shell 
> script
> But the simulation should also run under Windows and I don't have any 
> experience with grass and R under windows.

It sounds very well suited for Linux or MacOSX, but I've little idea about the
GRASS+R Windows situation. Maybe someone on the statsgrass mailing list knows?
(taking the liberty to cc)

> I have the following questions:
..
> 3) Is any other scripting language more suitable for what I want to 
> achieve (I have no experience with C / C++, but quite a bit with Delphi. 
> I have never used the likes of perl et al. and bash scrips seem a bit 
> awkward to me for bigger projects.)?

You could try python. The next version of GRASS will use python heavily for the
GUI, so expect lots of example scripts, help on the mailing list from fellow
travelers, and tight integration with the code.

Learn python in 10 min:  http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python

Also there is a SWIG/Python interface to any needed GIS library functions,
which is pretty cool, although the grass modules generally give you what you
need without having to resort to using any low-level libgis functions.

see  http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_and_Python
     http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass6/swig/python/

Hamish



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