Object-oriented design of a cotton crop model

We have developed a cotton crop model, Cotton + +. This model will eventually be coupled with an expert system to advise farmers when to irrigate, fertilize and harvest their crops. Cotton + + is written in the object-oriented programming language C + +. In this paper we discuss (1) the reasons we opted to adopt the object-oriented paradigm and (2) why we selected C + + over other available programming languages.