A description of the SIMSCRIPT language

Abstract

The production of a digital simulator program, or of any program for that matter, involves two steps: creating the model, then writing the program. Fundamentally, the writing of the program is a technical detail which must of necessity wait upon the creation of the model. Nevertheless, the nature of the machinery available for producing simulation programs is bound to exercise an influence on the nature of the model. This is true because effective modeling requires abstraction of the essence of the system under investigation, the direction taken in the abstraction being determined by the goals of the investigation. For complex systems it is very often not clear which of many possible abstractions is most valid for the purposes at hand.