Abstract

Computer analysis of biological systems, using approaches such as metabolic control analysis is common. A typical example is a language like Herbert Sauro's SCAMP (Sauro & Fell, 1991), which allows simulations of enzyme systems, and calculation of control coefficients and elasticities. However such systems are motivated by the underlying biochemical theory and often have limitations as programming languages which mean that they can only be applied to particular classes of problems.ABPL (a biochemical programming language) extends these ideas by adding all the facilities of a fully-fledged programming language, together with some of the capabilities of a modern computer algebra system. Syntactically it derives from the programming language LISP, while the underlying functionality is that of iMAP, the successor to SCAMP