A perspective on object-oriented simulation

The object-oriented view is that a system is composed of interacting objects. These objects are defined so that they hide those data and procedures which implement their behavior, however they can be manipulated by invoking publicly accessible methods defined for their class. These methods are invoked through messages which objects send to one another. New objects can be constructed from others through inheritance and subclasses. Functions and operators can be extended by overloading. Many of these features are available because of dynamic binding provided by object-oriented languages. There are a wide variety of object-oriented languages and some have facilities specifically for simulation. There is little doubt that future simulation languages will incorporate more ideas from an object-oriented perspective, especially as a means of extending the language to a wider variety of applications.