Computational neurobiology is an emerging eld which employs models to simulate the behavior of real neural systems. We present an environment that can be used to guide simulations using existing neural models. This environment is based on Perl, a powerful and standard script language. It also contains a standard library of routines for common simulation tasks. Included in the environment is an optimization package. Both simulation and optimization routines incorporate a novel approach to simulation data storage and retrieval. 1