<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: <occam@sutcase.case.syr.edu>. [David May et al, 1982. "Concurrent algorithms"]. ["Occam", D. May, SIGPLAN Notices 18(4):69-79, 1983]. (1994-11-18)

<language> An extension of occam produced in 1987. Occam 2 adds floating-point, functions and a type system. ["occam 2 Reference Manual", INMOS, P-H 1988, ISBN 0-13-629312-3]. (1994-11-18)

In computer science, occam-π (or occam-pi) is the name of a variant of the programming language occam developed by the Kent Retargetable occam Compiler (KRoC) team at the University of Kent. The name reflects the introduction of elements of π-calculus (pi-calculus) into occam, especially concepts involving mobile agents (processes) and data.

The Occam process is a solder-free, Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS)-compliant method for use in the manufacturing of electronic circuit boards developed by Verdant Electronics. It combines the usual two steps of the construction of printed circuit boards (PCBs) followed by the population process of placing various leaded and non-leaded electronic components into one process.

In computational learning theory, Occam learning is a model of algorithmic learning where the objective of the learner is to output a succinct representation of received training data. This is closely related to probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, where the learner is evaluated on its predictive power of a test set.

Occamism (or Ockhamism) is the philosophical and theological teaching developed by William of Ockham (1285–1347) and his disciples, which had widespread currency in the 14th century.

In mathematics, an Ockham algebra is a bounded distributive lattice with a dual endomorphism, that is, an operation ~ satisfying ~(x ∧ y) = ~x ∨ ~y, ~(x ∨ y) = ~x ∧ ~y, ~0 = 1, ~1 = 0. They were introduced by , and were named after William of Ockham by .

<philosophy> The English philosopher, William of Occam (1300-1349) propounded Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. (Latin for "Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary"). That is, the fewer assumptions an explanation of a phenomenon depends on, the better it is. For example, some claim that God caused himself to exist and also caused the universe to exist - he was the "first cause" - whereas Occam's Razor suggests that if one accepts the possibility of something causing itself then it is better to assume that it was the universe that caused itself rather than God because this explanation involves fewer entities. The negation of Occam's Razor would suggest that an arbitrarily complex explanation is just as good as the simplest one. (E.g. God and his cat created a robot called Sparky who built the universe from parts bought from a shop in another dimension). See also KISS Principle. (1995-11-09)