USING SR FOR DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION - A STUDY IN CONCURRENT PROGRAMMING

This paper demonstrates the use of the SR concurrent programming language for discrete event simulation. SR provides a rich collection of synchronization mechanisms, whose use can lead to programs that are simpler and more efficient than those constrained to employ only one synchronization mechanism. Several SR solutions to a simulation problem are presented and contrasted with an Ada solution to the same problem. The paper also introduces a technique that exploits asynchronous message passing to program concise solutions to several problems involving lists. In the context of the simulation problem, this technique is used to manage the event list and the list of blocked processes. The technique can also be applied to several other concurrent programming problems. The results of this paper should be of interest both to programmers using concurrent programming languages and to language designers. Copyright © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd