Re: Using Python for simulation

rjhe@oce.nl
Mon, 29 Aug 94 08:57:22 +0200

I once had about the same problem as you had: I wanted to emulate a
real-time executive on a Unix host. After some fiddling with setjmp()
and longjmp() I had a working system on a HP 68K machine. Then the
real trouble began: the HP PA machines were coming in, and my emulation
stopped working. Whatever I tried, I couldn't get the thing working on
these machines, so I started looking around for other systems which
supported the PA. After some time I came across a distributed systems
programming language called SR, which was constructed by researchers
of the University of Arizona, Tucson Arizona, USA and has been made
publically available via anonymous ftp.

Some investigations into the sources lead me to a very good starting
point for a multi-thread system, and yes (!) it supported HP 68K, HP
PA, Sun 68K, Sun SPARC, i386, MIPS, ...

After some work I had a version of my simulation running on a lot of
machines, including our DEC MIPS, i386 DOS boxes, Linux boxes, in fact
all the types of machines I ever come across at work.

I would like to conribute this work to the Python community, or in fact
to any subset of the Internet community, but I am afraid my boss won't
let me do so. However, I want to share my knowledge and point you to
SR. If you need any help locating it, or want to know more about how
I used it to build my multi-threading thing feel free to ask.

You can find out more about SR at cs.arizona.edu, in fact you can get
the sources from ftp.cs.arizona.edu in the sr directory.

Good luck,
Rob Hegt