An object oriented design is presented for a computer program that can perform\ud
thermo-mechanically coupled analyzes. The target of the design is a \ud
exible and robust\ud
computer program. It should be easy to adapt and extend, re-using existing code, without\ud
interfering with already established algorithms.\ud
The program uses publicly available toolkits that are currently emerging as C++ pack-\ud
ages. First of all the Standard C++ Library (formerly Standard Template Library) is\ud
used for packing items in container classes. Secondly the matrix and vector operations\ud
are derived from the Template Numerical Toolkit (TNT) and �nally (not essentially for\ud
the numerical part) a graphical user interface is made, based on the wxWindows package,\ud
that can generate a GUI for Motif and MS-Windows with the same code.\ud
Attention is given to the design of classes such as speci�c elements and material classes\ud
based on more general classes. A hierarchy of classes is constructed where general behavior\ud
is put high in the hierarchy and speci�c behavior low. The choice between inheritance and\ud
aggregation is made at several levels