2004-10-18 · in Ideas · 186 words

There are many applications where the CSP model seems appropriate to make visible to users as a way of modelling communicating objects in the real world. In these cases, a set of stock occam processes can be provided and hooked together using a large PAR and a bunch of channels.

To make it possible for people to do this without needing to learn a reasonable chunk of occam syntax first -- and to facilitate teaching CSP to newbies, much as BlueJ provides a friendly way of interacting with Java objects -- we could have a GUI frontend that lets you draw process diagrams by placing and connecting up processes, and is capable of generating either occam code or a standard format that an occam program using mobile channels could parse. (This would be roughly analogous to the Glade GUI designer, which can generate C code, but is more usually used to generate description files that libglade can read to construct GUIs on the fly.)

Such a frontend could be customised for particular applications: you'd have a set of standard tools, some fixed inputs and outputs, and so on.