This chapter will give you an overview of the basic structures and concepts of GRAPE. So both for users and programmers this chapter should be of interest, first of all to understand the main technical foundations of GRAPE, and secondly to give you an idea what already exists and what you can build upon. Unfortunately there are many people who spend a lot of time and energy to implement algorithms which are already present in the GRAPE library. Using all the features of the GRAPE library will save you a lot of time.
In our overview we will already use terms like class and method. GRAPE is an object-oriented environment. In case you have no idea about object-oriented techniques think about a class as a category of things with the same properties and functionality, the features or functions of an object or instance of a class are described as methods. If you want to read more about object-oriented programming please refer to section 5.1.
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