Occam

William of, died 1349? English scholastic philosopher.
Historical Examples

Mental Philosophy: Including the Intellect, Sensibilities, and Will Joseph Haven
Applied Eugenics Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Volume III J. H. Merle D’Aubign
Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) Isaac D’Israeli
The Catholic World; Vol. IV.; October, 1866, to March, 1867. E. Rameur
The Color Line William Benjamin Smith
The Mediaeval Mind (Volume II of II) Henry Osborn Taylor
Essays in Experimental Logic John Dewey
The Mediaeval Mind (Volume II of II) Henry Osborn Taylor
A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) Augustus de Morgan

noun
a variant spelling of (William of) Ockham
language
(Note lower case) A language based on Anthony Hoare’s CSP and David May’s EPL. Named after the English philosopher, William of Occam (1300-1349) who propounded Occam’s Razor. The occam language was designed by David May of INMOS to easily describe concurrent processes which communicate via one-way channels. It was developed to run on the INMOS transputer but compilers are available for VAX, Sun and Intel MDS, inter alia.
The basic entity in occam is the process of which there are four fundamental types, assignment, input, output, and wait. More complex processes are constructed from these using SEQ to specify sequential execution, PAR to specify parallel execution and ALT where each process is associated with an input from a channel. The process whose channel inputs first is executed. The fourth constructor is IF with a list of conditions and associated processes. The process executed is the one with the first true condition in textual order. There is no operator precedence.
The original occam is now known as “occam 1”. It was extended to occam 2.
Simulator for VAX (ftp://watserv1.waterloo.edu/).
Tahoe mailing list: .
[David May et al, 1982. “Concurrent algorithms”].
[“Occam”, D. May, SIGPLAN Notices 18(4):69-79, 1983].
(1994-11-18)