INTRODUCTION

The occam programming language is designed to express concurrent algorithms and their implementation on a network of processing components. The occam reference manual serves to provide a single reference, and definition of the language occam. The manual describes each aspect of the language, starting with the most primitive components of an occam program, and moving on to cover the whole language in detail. The manual is addressed to the wider audience, including not only the computer scientist, software engineer and programmer, but also the electronics engineer and system designer.

Programming in occam is easy. Occam enables an application to be described as a collection of processes, where each process executes concurrently, and communicates with other processes through channels. Each process in such an application describes the behaviour of a particular aspect of the implementation, and each channel describes the connection between each of the processes. This approach has two important consequences. Firstly, it gives the program a clearly defined and simple structure. Secondly, it allows the application to exploit the performance of a system which consists of many parts. Concurrency and communication are the prime concepts of the occam model. occam captures the hierarchical structure of a system by allowing an interconnected set of processes to be regarded as a unified, single process. At any level of detail, the programmer is only concerned with a small, manageable set ofprocesses.