We report on a comprehensive examination of the exotic superconductors (the materials so-labelled by Uemura and co-workers), to determine as far as possible the true systematics among their many anomalous features. In the crystal-chemistry aspects as well as in the electronic properties, we find features which appear to be universal for these materials, and also features which are clearly not universal but which are common enough to be considered typical for these materials. A number of implications are presented. It appears that all of these materials are sharing some ''new'' pairing mechanism, usually in addition to the conventional phonon mechanism.

The Overture framework is an object-oriented environment for solving partial differential equations in two and three space dimensions. It is a collection of C++ libraries that enables the use of finite difference and finite volume methods at a level that hides the details of the associated data structures. Overture can be used to solve problems in complicated, moving geometries using the method of overlapping grids. It has support for grid generation, difference operators, boundary conditions, data-base access and graphics. Short sample code segments are presented to show the power of this approach.