In case you find the basic classes of GRAPE useful but still need some special methods or new classes, don't hesitate to extent GRAPE so that it fulfills your own requirements. The prerequisites are that you have a working knowledge of C and an idea what object-oriented programming is. By the time the GRAPE project was planned and implemented there was no powerful object-oriented programming language around. So the object-oriented structure was realized in C. When you start programming think of classes as normal structs and of methods as functions. What GRAPE provides is a huge library of classes, methods and utility functions. Whatever you plan to do, you can always make use of objects like buttons, rulers and other interactive elements to be able to work with your application in the interactive GRAPE environment, this way your methods will be easily accessible. In chapter 5 you will find an introduction to programming with GRAPE. We hope will help you to get started -- all you need is a C-Compiler and some patience.
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