L-systems are very suitable for computer implementation,
and several systems appeared since the publication of Prusinkiewicz's milestone
book in this area [&make_named_href('',
"node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. These systems create beautiful L-system-based
plant pictures, and most of the systems are quite large.
On Unix, CPFG 2.7 was developed by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and his students
at the Universities of Regina and Calgary. It is an enhanced version of the
L-system language described in the book The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
[&make_named_href('',
"node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. This is very large software to facilitate model
experimentations on complicated L-systems. Specific species of plants are
modeled in this system. This is the only system that can produce
three-dimensional animations,
but from very complicated L-system definitions.
LSYS was written by Jon Leech in C++ from the description of
L-systems in the same book[&make_named_href('',
"node22.html#Prus90","[Prus90]")]. It uses data files to describe
the L-systems, and program execution is controlled by a command line.
Static image output is generated in PostScript files.
LParser was written on the PC by Laurens J. Lapre[&make_named_href('',
"node22.html#Lapr96","[Lapr96]")]. It has its own viewer which
uses wire-frame rendering to depict L-system structures. It allows mutations in
generation and has some preliminary animation support. It can also output
in several different formats for various ray tracers and renderers.
Since the emergence and popularity of the new computer language Java, much
software has been re-implemented in this language. Java is
almost an ideal language to implement and render L-system plant growing,
because of its capability of dealing with graphics and animation, and of course
with its famous feature of elegant object-oriented style and its machine
independence.
Few L-systems are implemented in Java at present. The only work that can be found
is a two dimensional rendering of the basic L-system in Java by Mark Mass in 1996
[&make_named_href('',
"node22.html#Mass96","[Mass96]")]. This work
represents the branches of the plant as plain, straight lines on the screen.