| Digital simulation is a useful tool for developing a better understanding of physical or hypothetical systems. It has been used with great success since the advent of the digital computer in such varied fields as weather prediction, planning military operations, and training. As digital computers become more capable and network communications systems more prevalent, the notion of synergistically combining the two to perform distributed simulation has led to some tremendous improvements in simulation speed and fidelity.; This dissertation describes a new programming language that is useful in creating distributed discrete event simulations without burdening simulation developers with the difficult and error-prone task of synchronizing nodes in a distributed simulation. Developers can instead focus on specifying the behavior of the objects in the virtual environment with little effort devoted to lower level concerns.; The language structure follows the notions of stimulus-response and completely isolates simulation object instances from each other. Inter-object communication occurs solely through message passing. Several example applications are described. |
