🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5631@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> bane@vtx.ma.man.ac.uk) (Michael ;-) writes:

>PS: Do many people still use occam? I was told recently by a systems person
>on a transputer machine that nobody uses occam anymore...

Yes, I use it in my Ph.D. work and it is used in teaching and various projects
here (3rd year, M.Sc.).  I believe other departments use occam in the main on
our machine too.

The occam syntax has always been a elegant tool for expressing parallelism
at all levels of a system, both high and low.  Occam is also the only
language I know of that possesses full compilation checking.  It is a very
simple language and is thus a very simple language to program in and reason
about quickly, I find I spend my time writing and running occam, with C I
tend to find myself spending probably about the same time writing and then
lots and lots of time just debugging.  Thus if possible I use occam, but
there are occasions where I use C.  Occam seems to lack a really good
user/program communications library.  I'm not saying occam should have a
perfect replica of stdio.h, for example I don't like having my field widths
has magic numbers in my printf()s, but occam should have something.

Occam's resulting code is fast, but it is also nice and small, and it is
nice not to have the few lines of code one writes turning into ever
larger and larger quanitities of disc space every year.

There are currently moves a foot to widen the range of platforms on which
occam can be ran.  Also occam 3 is on the way and has very many good ideas
for expansions to the language, in the domain of abstraction and information
hiding as well as adding constructs to replace common patterns.  Though I
don't like the current use of long keywords or the method of accessing the
fields of a data type.  All of this I will suspect will widen its use.

On a similar note the TDS, like every new and elegant code managing tool;
once one is fluent with it's workings, has its own continually growing set
of advantages over traditional editors.

Warren