A programming language for implementing computational models

The Scientific Computation Language (SCL) was designed mainly for developing computational models in education and research. This paper presents the justification for such a language, its relevant features, and a case study of a computational model implemented with the SCL. Development of the SCL language is part of the OOPsim project, which has had partial NSF support (CPATH). One of the goals of this project is to develop tools and approaches for designing and implementing computational models, emphasizing multi-disciplinary teams in the development process. A computational model is a computer implementation of the solution to a (scientific) problem for which a mathematical representation has been formulated. Developing a computational model consists of applying Computer Science concepts, principles and methods. The language syntax is defined at a higher level of abstraction than C, and includes language statements for improving program readability, debugging, maintenance, and correctness. The language design was influenced by Ada, Pascal, Eiffel, Java, C, and C++. The keywords have been added to maintain full compatibility with C. The SCL language translator is an executable program that is implemented as a one-pass language processor that generates C source code. The generated code can be integrated conveniently with any C and/or C++ library, on Linux and Windows (and MacOS). The semantics of SCL is informally defined to be the same C semantics.