SLX, the Successor to GPSS/H

Abstract

This paper describes SLX, Wolverine Software's "next generation" successor to GPSS/H. SLX retains fundamental concepts of GPSS/H, such as its Transaction-flow world-view, Facilities, Queues, and Storages. However, SLX replaces some GPSS/H features entirely, and it replaces collections of disparate GPSS/H features with simpler, more general features. SLX is much more than a new implementation of GPSS/H. SLX is a layered modeling system in which GPSS/H comprises but one of the layers. SLX provides a foundation under GPSS/H and powerful extensibility mechanisms which facilitate the development of higher level, application-specific modeling tools. The sections which follow provide an overview of SLX, and describe the goals of the development of SLX, the architecture of SLX, the SLX environment, concepts retained from GPSS/H, features modeled after other languages, and the extensibility mechanisms of SLX. The relationship of SLX to other modeling tools is discussed in Section 8, entitled "Can Do, Can't Do, Must Do, Should Do, Shouldn't Do." Since SLX is still under development as of this writing, this paper emphasizes design philosophies and principles, rather than concrete, syntactically accurate examples. The presentation of this paper will include a "live" demonstration.