Paper Details

The Development of occam: types, classes and sharing

Authors: Barrett, Geoff

Abstract:

The proposed extensions to the occam* language are aimed at providing • a more comprehensive type system• support for a modular programming style• a facility for sharing between processes.The type system is similar to that of many modern programming languages but with a careful treatment of union types and without recursive types.Although it is possible to describe shared objects in occam2, the required idiom has an implementation whose complexity is linear in the number of users. By introducing a special sort of shared bus of channels, this problem can be overcome.The class system is designed in such a way as to allow for separate compilation and alien code classes to be used in occam programs with little overhead and to provide some of the abstraction mechanisms which have been recognised as beneficial in object-oriented languages.There are also a number of new language features which do not significantly change the nature of the language but which do enhance its general expressiveness.The first part of this paper presents proposed changes to the occam2 reference manual ([1]). The second part is a commentary on the decisions which had to be made in order to produce the proposal. The section numbers of the manual changes correspond to the section numbers of the occam2 reference manual where a ' denotes a change to an existing section and a letter denotes the insertion of a new section.

Proceedings:

OUG-13: Real-Time Systems with Transputers, Hussein S. M. Zedan, 1990, pp 119 - 147 published by IOS Press, Amsterdam

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