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SimPOL: Language and Translator for Object-Oriented Process Simulation
Brian Malloy, Mary Jean Harrold, and John McGregor
Abstract
We present our new system for object-oriented process
simulation, called SimPOL, that consists of two main components.
The first component is the SimPOL language that
incorporates simulation constructs
into C++, an existing general-purpose object-oriented language, to produce
a new language that is an extension of C++.
The SimPOL language permits the user to construct
a program for
simulation modeling using simulation primitives like those in SIMULA.
The second component is the SimPOL translator that translates the
SimPOL language program into a C{++ program by
transforming the actions of each entity in the model into a process.
A base class from which each of the simulation classes inherits, provides
the simulation primitives to the user's classes.
We have implemented a prototype of the SimPOL translator
that demonstrates the usefulness and portability of SimPOL.
The main benefit of our approach is the ease of simulation
programming that it provides to the user because the simulation
primitives required to model processes can be learned quickly by any
C++ programmer.
Another important benefit of our approach over previous approaches
is that our preprocessor can be used with any existing C++
compiler and is therefore, truly portable.
Since C++ is the most widely used object-oriented language,
SimPOL will be of use to a large portion of the modeling community.
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