An introduction to Occam and the development of parallel software

Most people´s knowledge of Occam¿¿ derives from their interest in the Inmos¿¿ Transputer. Occam is the language of the Transputer, the two having been developed hand-in-hand by Inmos. Although most of the initial applications of Occam have been concerned with extracting the maximum performance from multiple Transputer-based architectures, it should be pointed out that Occam is not an assembly-level language. Occam is a high-level language with many points to recommend it in its own right. The Transputer has made Occam commercially viable, but, even without the Transputer, Occam would have attracted a considerable amount of interest. This article provides an introduction to Occam and, where applicable, compares and contrasts it with Ada*. Occam is far simpler that Ada, but the two languages do have similarities. The models of concurrency in both Ada and Occam were derived from Hoare´s work on Communicating Sequential Processes(CSP) [3]. and both languages have been developed for use in real-time embedded systems [4].