🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8904101227.AA05713@uk.ac.ox.prg> IAN@vax1.esprit.southampton.ac.uk writes:
>No doubt Milner's CCS is indeed a more general tool to describe a wide
>variety of models of concurrent behaviour, but that is not the intention
>of occam.  It is intended to be a programming language.

Fair enough. I was probably getting a little wound up by the way that OCCAM
keeps getting referred to as a "calculus", as if there is something magically
formal about it that sets it completely apart from other languages. It
*does* have some nice (and important) semantic properties, but I certainly
would not call it a formal language; it is a programming language, like you
say, nothing more, nothing less.
   Actually, I quite like OCCAM. It provides a good way of building frameworks
and mechanisms to handle the concurrent part(s) of an application. However,
it totally fails to provide some of the important aspects of a software
system: recursion, abstraction, data structuring, etc. In a recent project
we tied 20000 lines of C (a compiler for an abstract language, abstract
code generator, interpreter, and so on) with some OCCAM to provide a
communications base. Writing the compiler in OCCAM would have been a virtual
non-starter. Writing it in C was bad enough, given that the prototype was
in ML.
   The main reason for OCCAM's failure, I think, is the closed world
philosophy that went along with it. INMOS wanted everybody to program
entirely in OCCAM under the TDS on their Sage computers. Everything else
was "alien" - even files. We threw the OCCAM out of our project and used C
instead, because OCCAM's little world was so completely nonstandard and
different to everything else. Using C and the 3L tools, we can drive the
development process from a Sun. Had INMOS brought out a "batch" OCCAM
compiler, and believed in conventional machines and file systems, things
might have been different. What do other people feel?

>| Ian Glendinning

		Nick.
--
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
...while the builders of the cages sleep with bullets, bars and stone,
they do not see your road to freedom that you build with flesh and bone.