NELIAC Simulator(ID:7471/)

Simulation extensions to NELIAC 

Series of extensions to NELIAC to perform simulations proposed and possibly implemented by Huskey
Related languages
NELIAC => NELIAC Simulator   Extension of
References:
  • Huskey, H. D. "A language for simulation" view details
          in Hoggatt, A. C., and Balderston, F. E. Symposium on Simulation Models: Methodology and Applications to the Behavioral Sciences 1963. South-Western Publishing Co., Cinn. Ohio. 1964 view details
  • Onega, T. review of Huskey 1963 (NELIAC simulator) view details Abstract: As early as 1960, just after the publication of Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 by Peter Naur (whose name was wrongly spelled in the present paper's references), the author and his collaborators at Berkeley, were divulging the "NELIAC - A Dialect of ALGOL" [ Comm. ACM 3, 7 (Aug. 1960), perhaps as an instinctive reflex of the fact that all the languages of the New World (American, Canadian, "Castelliano" and Brazilian) are dialects of the original European ones (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese). Following his dialectal work, the author adapted the NELIAC for simulation purposes. In high-speed computers, the new dialect may lead eventually to the writing of compilers in the very language (as Jacques Cohen did in 1964, in Grenoble, for Algol), and the utilization of the usual technique of compile-and-run. The syntax of the new language (nameless so far: SIMIAC could be suggestively offered -- in recalling NELIAC, and also because of the highly imitative quality of simians) is summed up in a set of 39 rules orthographed in near ALGoL (to differentiate, "Boolean" was replaced by "logical" -- and one could disagree with that, since "logical" is too broad, and could mean trivalent functions too, not only Boolean ones -- and a new set of symbols was introduced: for example: ::= + I -- I V, ::= + 1/1 A, ::= + | - |'~, ::= , etc.). The program includes priority rules among operators, and "assignment," "sequence," "conditional," "pro cedure," "for" and "declaration" statements. A program of a "two-firm business game" is given as an illustrative example and, in fact, the language seems sufficiently close to readable English.

    On the whole, this is a good try for a systematization of some metalinguistical applications with a simplified description of system modeling.

    However, it lacks information about the minimum capacity of the memory and the indispensable hardware for the program to be actually run in a definite type of computer (excluding the 6 mentioned in the summary.


          in ACM Computing Reviews 6(03) May-June 1965     view details