Definition: occam

An early parallel processing language from Inmos Limited that was developed in the 1980s to handle concurrent operations. The Inmos Transputer executed occam almost directly. In the following statements, two items of data are read and incremented at the same time. PAR specifies that following statements are to be executed concurrently, and SEQ indicates that the following statements are executed sequentially. See transputer.

   PAR
    SEQ
      chan1 ? item1
      item1 := item1 + 1
    SEQ
      chan2 ? item2
      item2 := item2 + 1