SIMSCRIPT is a free-form,
English-like general-purpose
simulation language conceived by
Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner at the
RAND Corporation
The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financ ...
in 1962. It was implemented as a
Fortran preprocessor on the
IBM 7090 and was designed for large
discrete event simulations. It influenced
Simula
Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of AL ...
.
Though earlier versions were released into the public domain, SIMSCRIPT was commercialized by Markowitz's company,
California Analysis Center, Inc. (CACI), which produced proprietary versions SIMSCRIPT I.5 and
SIMSCRIPT II.5.
SIMSCRIPT II.5
SIMSCRIPT II.5 was the last pre-PC incarnation of SIMSCRIPT, one of the oldest computer
simulation languages. Although military contractor
CACI released it in 1971, it still enjoys wide use in large-scale military and air-traffic control simulations.
:''SIMSCRIPT II.5 is a powerful, free-form, English-like, general-purpose simulation programming language. It supports the application of software engineering principles, such as structured programming and modularity, which impart orderliness and manageability to simulation models.''
SIMSCRIPT III
''SIMSCRIPT III'' ''Release 4.0'' was available by 2009, and by then it ran on
Windows 7,
SUN OS and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
and has
Object-oriented features.
By 1997, SIMSCRIPT III already had a GUI interface to its compiler. The latest version is ''Release 5''; earlier versions already supported 64-bit processing.
PL/I implementation
A
PL/I implementation was developed during 1968-1969, based on the public domain version released by RAND corporation.
See also
*
QUIKSCRIPT
*
GPSS
References
External links
CACI SIMSCRIPT pageHistory of Programming Languages: SIMSCRIPTOral history interview with Harry M. Markowitz Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
, University of Minnesota -
Markowitz Markowitz may refer to:
People
* Deborah Markowitz, Vermont secretary of state
* Gerald Markowitz, American historian
* Harry Markowitz, a financial economist and Nobel Laureate
* John Markowitz, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Co ...
discusses his development of
portfolio theory
Modern portfolio theory (MPT), or mean-variance analysis, is a mathematical framework for assembling a portfolio of assets such that the expected return is maximized for a given level of risk. It is a formalization and extension of diversificatio ...
, sparse matrices, and his work at the
RAND Corporation
The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financ ...
and elsewhere on simulation software development (including computer language SIMSCRIPT), modeling, and operations research.
{{Authority control
Fortran
Simulation programming languages