SHIFT Programming Tutorial

Daniel Wiesmann

Introduction

This tutorial presents and explains four increasingly complicated programs that display various features of the shift languages. Reading this document will not make you an expert in the language, but it may allow you to understand what kinds of programs can be written in the language. Shift is a language that will allow you to create simulations very easily.

This manual aims to take a new shift user through a tour of some of the language's features. Through four examples, we will take the user from the equivalent of the language's "Hello world" program to an example incorporating many of shift's unique features.

The following are technical documents that explain the workings of SHIFT in depth.
To find documentation on the SHIFT language, check in the documentation section

In particular, you should look at these:

The Shift Reference Manual is a reference manual for the SHIFT language,
The TkShift Debugger User Guide explains how the TkShift debugger works. This is the tool used to create the animations and graphs that are shown on this document. Following each of the examples below are instructions on how to create these graphs and animations yourself,
The SHIFT Tutorial: A first course for SHIFT programmers.

Lesson 1 is just a small working program. This lesson introduces types, components , flows and discrete states..
Lesson 2 deals with transitions, and shows the difference between continuous numbers and discrete numbers .
In Lesson 3 we solve the same problem as in lesson 2, but use a different solution. This example introduces sets and event synchronization.
Lesson 4 illustrates input-output connections and the setup clause.