We're doing it at the moment. It's designed for parallelism. Quite a weird and wonderful language.
I just wondered if anyone else had ever used it?
I've never heard of it before but it sounds intriguing, can you give us an example?
With parallelism in hardware looking like the future it makes sense to have the associated software languages to go with. Has something like this been done before yet?
They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them.
I was reminded of this because I got talking to one of the old managers where I work, who remembers OCCAM, and the processors it was written for, transputers. Basically the processors were designed to be used in massively parallel boxes (10 + processors seems to have been modest), and the OCCAM language was specifically designed to make the most of that architecture.
What caught my eye was the news about the Intel 80 core experimental processor, Like a few people mentioned, the problem comes with actually making use of all those cores, so I wondered if OCCAM might get a resurgence of interest as Multi-Core becomes the norm?
It's interesting features include that it is implicitly parallel (ie, unless you say so specifically, any and all statements could be executed in parallel).
I imagine that it's not much fun to write modern, large, real-world applications with this sort of thing, but maybe the principles could be borrowed into a newer, OO language?
(There's no great point to all this, I was just interested and geeking)
They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them.
I've done some Ogham !
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ymote_170r.jpg
No good for programming mind![]()
hehe yeah i've heard of this on my distributed computing course, my lecturer goes on at length about OCCAM, INMOS Transputers and the various OS's. All interesting stuff...and quite close to what Sony are doing with the PS3s Cell processors iirc
With intel experimenting in that line too its good to see past ideas coming back - especially as transputers were and are still a great idea - they only failed at the time for commercial reasons (each CPU was VERY expensive to produce by the time they got to useful speeds, and when you needed 20+ for some applications (or even hundreds) they just became too expensive compared to x86 tech.
Ahh Occam, yes i've done this and remember getting decent marks on this on a CS course i did. Very easy if you can think logically
Might have my course notes and code if you desperate for some more info.
TiG
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