Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: jan@neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de (Jan Vorbrueggen)
Subject: Re: OCCAM3 (was :- Revision of occam 2 Referenc
Organization: Institut fuer Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany
Date: 13 Aug 94 18:54:03 GMT
Message-ID: <JAN.94Aug13195403@thalia.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>

In article <Cu4Itz.3p1@wizzy.com> andyr@wizzy.com (Andy Rabagliati) writes:

   >Hm... Haven't looked into that.. From what I hear of people using C on
   >transputers (may be a different compiler) it is much more inconvenient 
   >to create parallel processes and synchronise them. In OCCAM parallelism
   >is pretty well expressed in the code.

   Well, yes. I would write it in OCCAM, and then transliterate into C, if
   I wanted the C functionality. That inconvenience is real, and if you
   want dynamic process creation maybe the programmer is the only one
   qualified to make those decisions, not the compiler writer.

The reason we did not convert a large application to C when going less tedious
at the same time was that C, both by the way it's defined and it is
implemented in the toolset, generates much les efficient code. occam makes
much better use of the workspace because of local scoping, for instance. Of
course, the real reason was that debugging would have become a nightmare with
C, as Andy so eloquently ("withers and dies") describes.

	Jan

PS: At last, some real discussion of transputers and especially occam! Where
have all the transputer fans been hiding? Behind thos big 1991 T9000
announcements 8-(??

