1.
[syn: Occam, William of Occam, Ockham, William of Ockham]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
Occam
n 1: English scholastic philosopher and assumed author of
Occam's Razor (1285-1349) [syn: Occam, William of
Occam, Ockham, William of Ockham]
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
occam
(Note lower case) A language based on Anthony
Hoare's CSP and David May's EPL. Named after the
English philosopher, William of Occam (1300-1349) who
propounded Occam's Razor. The occam language was designed
by David May of INMOS to easily describe concurrent
processes which communicate via one-way channels. It was
developed to run on the INMOS transputer but compilers
are available for VAX, Sun and Intel MDS, inter alia.
The basic entity in occam is the process of which there are
four fundamental types, assignment, input, output, and wait.
More complex processes are constructed from these using SEQ to
specify sequential execution, PAR to specify parallel
execution and ALT where each process is associated with an
input from a channel. The process whose channel inputs first
is executed. The fourth constructor is IF with a list of
conditions and associated processes. The process executed is
the one with the first true condition in textual order. There
is no operator precedence.
The original occam is now known as "occam 1". It was extended
to occam 2.
Simulator for VAX (ftp://watserv1.waterloo.edu/).
Tahoe mailing list: .
[David May et al, 1982. "Concurrent algorithms"].
["Occam", D. May, SIGPLAN Notices 18(4):69-79, 1983].
(1994-11-18)