Damien Joly wrote:

>Basically, I simulate the population ecology of
>wildlife disease.  Whether an animal gets a disease or
>not, and then the progression of the disease once
>infected, is a function of a number of attributes of
>that individual.  OOP seems perfect for this task, as
>each individual would be an object, with "attributes"
>(sex, age, immune status, presence or absence of
>disease etc.) and "behaviours" (give birth, die,
>become infected, migrate etc.).
>
I have a little simulated election system which works like this, voters 
die too!

Ruby seems fine for this and I understand that all this memory adding or 
deleting may seem extragavant(!) but don't let it worry you as Ruby will 
handle the memory without a hitch. Unless your simulation is very large, 
or your computer very small or your runs very long then you should find 
there is no real need to resort to bytemisering. Concentrate on the 
code. I have done a little simulation and a lot of GAs and they work 
fine. C++ gives faster tighter code for this sort of thing but the code 
takes soooo long to write.

Welcome to Ruby, you'll be throwing programs together in no time.