8.2 Gravitylab

Our aim is to build a powerful software environment for experiments in stellar dynamics of dense stellar systems. The idea is to build a virtual laboratory, which we will call gravitylab. From now on, each new tool in our tool box will have a distinctive `gravitylab' header:

We will not show these headers in future code listings, but they will be there in the source code for other tools. The three stars moving on a figure-8 orbit are inspired by the solution presented in chapter 5. They are being observed at bottom left by the small figure looking through a telescope.

Note the time stamp at the very first line. This is a handy feature of the emacs editor that we have used to write this book. When you add the line ``(add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)'' to the .emacs startup file, the date and time and user name will be updated automatically each time you write the file to disk.