Figure 1 -- Overview of compartmental modeling. In (a), a branching section of dendrite has been divided into seven cylindrical compartments. Each is connected to its neighbors via bidirectional links. In the CONICAL library, these objects would be implemented with the Cylinder and Link class, respectively. (b) shows an equivalent electric circuit for one compartment. Links to neighboring compartments (left) are resistors; the cell membrane includes a capacitance, a resistor and membrane potential, and variable resistors which correspond to active channels (left to right).
	Figure 2 -- Inheritance diagram for the CONICAL library. Each line indicates that the class on the right is derived from the class on the left; a derived class implements all the functionality of its base class, and extends it with additional capabilities. Note that Compartment, Delay, and MarkovSyn each derive from several classes.
	Figure 3 -- A CONICAL program is compared to the equivalent Genesis and Neuron scripts on several measures: (a) kilobytes of memory used at run time; (b) lines of user-written code, excluding comments; (c) CPU time required as a function of simulation time. Tests were run on a Sparc 10 workstation under SunOS 4.1.3. The amount of code (b) for the Neuron script is not strictly comparable to the others, since several parameters of the model could not be set from within the scripting language.