kathy@ut-emx.UUCP (Katherine Holcomb) (08/15/90)
Thanks to all who responded to my recent request for information about public-domain simulation languages/packages. I received several requests to summarize to the net, so here's what I found out. Two respondents suggested the newsgroup comp.simulation. The moderator of this newsgroup, Paul Fishwick, has an ftp site for a package called SIMPACK (anonymous ftp to bikini.cis.ufl.edu; see comp.simulation for details). Tim McGuire suggested a simulation language written by Guy Curry, Bryan Deuermeyer, and Richard Feldman of Texas A&M, Dept. of Industrial Engineering. It's part of a package (Micro/OR) and runs on IBM compatibles. It isn't PD but is inexpensive. Ken Warkentyne <warkent@ltisun.epfl.ch> of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has a package for simulating network protocols; it is PD and is in C, C++, or Modula II. Christophe Muller suggested Lund Software House <boris@dna.lth.se>, which sells SIMULA for Suns, Vaxes, etc., and apparently will give away the compiler for the Mac and Mac II (ftp to rascal.ics.utexas.edu, directory mac/programming/simula). He also mentioned DISC++, a set of routines in C and C++ by Eric Blair and Sathyakumar Selvaraj at Texas Tech University; this package may or may not be PD. Graeme Williams recommended the use of an object-oriented language such as Smalltalk, since a simulation inevitably requires a lot of program development anyway, so it is often easier to write one's own set of routines in a well-chosen base language than to do a lot of programming in the simulation language. Thanks again! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Katherine Holcomb | The University of Texas at Austin has no opinions kathy@emx.utexas.edu | Computation Center | University of Texas | Austin, TX 78712 | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------