SIMSCRIPT is a free-form, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

-like general-purpose simulation language

Simulation language

A computer simulation language describes the operation of a simulation on a computer. There are two major types of simulation: continuous and discrete event though more modern languages can handle combinations. Most languages also have a graphical interface and at least simple statistical gathering...

 conceived by Harry Markowitz

Harry Markowitz

Harry Max Markowitz is an American economist and a recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences....

 and Bernard Hausner at the RAND Corporation

RAND

RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...

 in 1963. It was implemented as a Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 preprocessor

Preprocessor

In computer science, a preprocessor is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input to another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which is often used by some subsequent programs like compilers...

 on the IBM 7090

IBM 7090

The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation...

 and was designed for large discrete event simulation

Discrete Event Simulation

In discrete-event simulation, the operation of a system is represented as a chronological sequence of events. Each event occurs at an instant in time and marks a change of state in the system...

s. It influenced Simula

Simula

Simula is a name for two 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...

.

Though earlier versions were released into the public domain, SIMSCRIPT was commercialized by Markowitz's company, California Analysis Center, Inc.

CACI

CACI International Inc is a professional services and information technology company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. CACI is a member of the Fortune 1000 Largest Companies and the Russell 2000 index. The company has approximately 13,700 employees in over 120 offices in the U.S. and...

, which produced proprietary versions SIMSCRIPT I.5 and SIMSCRIPT II.5

SIMSCRIPT II.5

SIMSCRIPT II.5 is the latest incarnation of SIMSCRIPT, one of the oldest computer simulation languages. Although military contractor CACI released it in 1971, it still enjoys wide use in large-scale military and air-traffic control simulations....

.

External links

• History of Programming Languages: SIMSCRIPT
• Oral history interview with Harry M. Markowitz, Charles Babbage Institute
  Charles Babbage Institute
  The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
  
  , University of Minnesota - Markowitz
  Harry Markowitz
  Harry Max Markowitz is an American economist and a recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences....
  
   discusses his development of portfolio theory, sparse matrices, and his work at the RAND Corporation and elsewhere on simulation software development (including computer language SIMSCRIPT), modeling, and operations research.