SIMSCRIPT is a free-form, English-like general-purpose simulation language conceived by

Harry Markowitz Harry Max Markowitz (August 24, 1927 – June 22, 2023) was an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Markowitz was a professor of finance at the Rady Scho ...

and Bernard Hausner at the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

in 1962. It was implemented as a Fortran

preprocessor In computer science, a preprocessor (or precompiler) is a Computer program, program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which i ...

on the

IBM 7090 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation Transistor computer, transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member o ...

and was designed for large

discrete event simulation A discrete-event simulation (DES) models the operation of a system as a (discrete) sequence of events in time. Each event occurs at a particular instant in time and marks a change of state in the system. Between consecutive events, no change in th ...

s. 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 CACI International Inc. (originally California Analysis Center, Inc., then Consolidated Analysis Center, Inc.) is an American multinational corporation, multinational professional services and information technology company headquartered in Nor ...

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 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

, SUN OS and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and has

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impleme ...

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

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language initially developed by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It has b ...

implementation was developed during 1968–1969, based on the public domain version released by

References

External links

CACI SIMSCRIPT page

History of Programming Languages: SIMSCRIPT

Oral 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 discusses his development of portfolio theory, sparse matrices, and his work at the

and elsewhere on simulation software development (including computer language SIMSCRIPT), modeling, and operations research. {{Authority control Fortran Simulation programming languages

SIMSCRIPT II.5

SIMSCRIPT III

PL/I implementation

See also

References

External links