What truly unique features does SLX have?
SLX contains many innovations. The three most important are its capabilities for expressing parallelism, its “wait until” mechanism, and its compiled macros and statement definitions. 1. The most important reason one uses a simulation language is to be able to describe processes that take place in parallel. The ease with which this can be accomplished is an important measure of the power of any simulation tool. SLX provides very powerful mechanisms for describing parallel processes. In SLX, models are built by describing a system as a collection of objects. For each class of objects, attributes are defined which describe the class’s characteristics. For example, in a model of a harbor, an object class representing ships might have attributes of tonnage, departure time, and cargo type. At any given time, a system can contain multiple instances of a given object class. For example, in a model of a harbor there will be many instances of ship objects, each with its own unique tonnage, depa
