I'm also a Numbers fan. I actually like using Pages too. When I use Microsoft Office, I remember its power but I also find it relatively difficult to use.
Pages greatly confused me the first time I tried to use it, several years ago. That's because it included a bunch of templates for different kinds of documents, and when you created a new document from one of those templates the document was full of text and images.
That text was Lorem ipsum [1]. I had never seen that before and assumed that I had somehow gotten the templates for some other language installed with my English Pages install.
I then spent a few hours trying to figure out how to change template language settings or install English templates.
I eventually copies some of the text and Googled it, hoping to find someone else who had this problem and had found the fix and then learned about Lorem ipsum.
Nowadays when you create a document from the templates that come with Pages the placeholder text is in your language and is usage instructions for the template.
These days, without knowing more about preferred programming language or the purpose of the implementation, I'd probably start by pointing to this very thorough series of blog posts by Eric Lippert, from LifeWiki/Tutorials:
Life simulators have been coded in so many different ways, in so many languages, by so many different people in the last half-century ... that it takes several dozen articles to work through a reasonable survey of the possible ideas and methods.
