Temporal Scripts for Objects1

Computer animation, computer simulation, computer music and other areas often need to deal with concurrent activities with specific temporal characteristics. This paper proposes a scripting facility to help program such applications. This facility provides support for specifying long-term behaviour of objects in an object-oriented environment. Temporal scripts can be instantiated and combined using a. set of temporal operators, saying for example that two activities begin at the same time, or that one has to follow the other. Through a flexible sampling policy based on a notion of virtual time, temporal specifications can be executed at various temporal resolutions, and therefore can be reused in different contexts.