On the Programming Language SIMSCRIPT II.5
a software poem by Jonathan Vos Post
(With Apologies to Samuel Butler's
Hudibras "A Babylonish Dialect...")
A simulationist dialect
which folks at RAND do much affect
it was a patchwork party dress
of half a dozen languages.
It sprang from a language called SPS-1
which was, in turn, the linguistic son
of GEMS, the child of sparks and bits
and Air Force money, and Markowitz.
Markowitz, Kiviat, Villanueva
eager to meet with the RAND Project's favor
rolled up some syntax and let the thing snowball
with LET statements (BASIC), Arithmetic (COBOL),
and PL/I's structures and ALGOL's recursions
and Entity-Attributes, like some LISP versions --
models, discrete, can still show strange perversions!
The whole was a jumble of multiple things,
an asynchronous mess held together by strings,
with features hung on, and swinging from hammocks,
collecting statistics, controlling dynamics.
A histogram symphony on an harmonica
like SIMPAC (Mike Lackner, SDC, Santa Monica),
GPSS (IBM), CSL (by the British).
Semantic? It's frantic, though syntax is skittish.
It has such an oddly promiscuous tone
(like a string quartet plus a saxophone)
that to speak it requires fantastical stunts:
the nine heads of the Hydra all babbling at once.
1850-1935
20 Apr 85
Copyright 1996, 1997 by Emerald City Publishing.
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