disease model

A couple of times I've posted questions to this list,
and was really appreciative of the quick and very
helpful answers list members provided.

I'm a population ecologist interested in wildlife
disease, and have used modeling extensively in my
research.  Recently (e.g., in the last 2 weeks), I've
started to use RUBY to model these ecosystems, as the
OOP paradigm in general seems to lend itself well to
simulation of ecological systems.  In particular, I'm
finding that, as I read over over again in posts, Ruby
brings joy back into programming and is extremely
intuitive (compare 2 weeks to learn Ruby enough write
a functioning disease model vs. 2 weeks and I'm not
past pointers in C++).

So far, I've seen no references to the use of Ruby in
ecological modelling, and searching through the
literature databases like Current Contents etc. 
revealed nothing.

Consequently, I wanted to post my very first disease
model written in Ruby to illustrate the language's
effectiveness as a ecological modelling tool. I do
this in case there are other ecologists out there
considering learning Ruby.

The code for an age- and sex-structured, individual
based model to simulate a disease with latent and
infectious periods is at:

http://www.geocities.com/do_joly/disease.txt

Example results are at:

http://www.geocities.com/do_joly/disease.pdf

I realize that my code lacks elegance and efficiency,
so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 
Also, to make sure that I don't forget things as I
learn them, I comment the hell out of the code as I
go, even for simple things.  As I know nothing about
GUI development, it runs off a prompt and just dumps
the results to files.  I actually call the script from
an R procedure that plots the results.

Thanks,

Damien



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