Simula - Definition and Overview

Simula introduced the object-oriented programming paradigm and thus can be considered the first object-oriented programming language and a predecessor to Smalltalk, C++, Java, and all modern class-based object-oriented languages. As its name implies, Simula was designed for doing simulations, and the needs of that domain provided the framework for many of the features of object-oriented languages today.

Simula was developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Centre in Oslo, primarily by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is a superset of Algol60, adding features that are close to the modern idea of classes and objects, plus coroutines.

Simula was never just an academic language (it was still used for a few real-world applications as of 2003), but its historical influence is considered far more important than any actual work done with it.

Hello world

An example of a Hello world program in Simula:

BEGIN
  WHILE 1=1 DO 
    BEGIN
      outtext("Hello World!");
      outimage;
    END;
END;

See also

• Object-oriented programming
• BETA programming language (a modern successor to Simula)
• Simulation language
• ENEA AB

External links

• Introduction to OOP in Simula (http://staff.um.edu.mt/jskl1/talk.html) – By J.Sklenar, based on the 1997 seminar "30 Years of Object Oriented Programming (OOP)" at the U. of Malta
• How Object-Oriented Programming Started (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~kristen/FORSKNINGSDOK_MAPPE/F_OO_start.html) – By Dahl and Nygaard, abbrev. version of an encyclopedia article; on Nygaards home page