Occam.NET.

Abstract

Microsoft's .NET Framework has been under development for more than 6 years now, and since its official introduction in early 2002 with the first release of Visual Studio .NET, development using the .NET Framework has taken the world at storm. The structure of the .NET Framework in fact, is flexible enough to represent most of the programming constructs used by several languages. To prove this point, many "traditional" languages have been ported over to the .NET environment. Such languages include COBOL, Oberon, and C++ (although the current C++ managed extensions lack both expressiveness and clearness). These languages are rich in their expressive power but lack appropriate constructs to support concurrency and concurrent communication. The occam language is different in that it was designed specifically with concurrency in mind. For this purpose, it provides special constructs for which no direct equivalent exists in other programming languages. Although the .NET Framework provides classes for concurrent process design through its Sys tern. Threading namespace, using these classes in a language such as C# can quickly become cumbersome, especially when compared to the simplicity with which an occam construct achieves the same result. This dissertation describes the development of an occam compiler which brings occam's simplicity for concurrent designs to the managed world of the .NET Framework and the Common Language Runtime. It is important to note that this compiler is not a native .NET compiler like that of C# or Visual Basic .NET, but rather an intermediate compiler in that it generates a source file of IL (Microsoft's Intermediate Language) instructions which must then be compiled with Microsoft's .NET IL Assembler in order to produce the final executable fik.