The license is a novel concept in Explain™. A license encapsulates a whole group of abilities or skills. Different groups of skills have different license names. An object may have more than one license. We use this metaphor in real life all the time. A plumber, for example, has a plumber's license and a driver's license. Each license attributes a whole group of skills to the plumber. Each object that has a given license may implement the individual skills differently.
To see how we implement this in Explain, examine this portion of the sample script:
class "RampSignal"
... callin Signal license VRAMP
; other initialization statements
Sig = VRAMP.New(....)
Pstat.SetSignal(Sig)
Crv = CURVE.New("CURVE", Pstat)
Objects of the class VRAMP have the Signal license. Other classes may also have the Signal license. One example is the VSTEP class, which is used to generate a step signal rather than a ramp signal. A PSTAT object needs an object with the Signal license to determine the applied voltage at each point and to define the number of points in the curve. After the PSTAT object is created, the name of a Signal object is passed to the Pstat using the Pstat.SetSignal function.