How are Ptolemy II and Matlab/Simulink different?
Ptolemy II has very little in common with Matlab, which is a textual, imperative, interactive, scientific programming language. Ptolemy II works with Matlab, thanks to an interface developed by Zoltan Kemenczy and others at Research In Motion, Ltd. See http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ptIIlatest/ptII/ptolemy/matlab/matlab.htm Ptolemy II has much more in common with Simulink, which is a graphical block-diagram language, originally developed for control system design. Simulink has a rich and expressive model of computation with continuous-time semantics and support for periodic discrete-time signals. Some of its principles have been incorporated in the CT (continuous-time) domain of Ptolemy II, but not all. The CT domain, for example, does not have the notion of “sample time” (which in Simulink provides the periodic discrete-time support) nor the support for algebraic loops. There is also currently no code generation support in CT (in Simulink, this is provided through the asso
