The Singing Dining Philosophers
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These files contain binary executables for SPARC (SunOS/Solaris) and Alpha
(OSF/1) UNIX workstations.  They were compiled from occam sources using the
KRoC 0.9beta compiler.

The program animates Dijkstra's classic Dining Philosophers using just the
UNIX `stdout' text channel -- i.e. no graphics.  Nevertheless, it is quite
fun and shows what can be done.  A user can interact with the system (to
freeze the action, instruct the butler to vary the number of philosophers
allowed into the dining room at the same time and to break philosophers'
right arms for a while) -- instructions are given on screen.  However, if
you let all five into the dining room and they all manage to pick up one
fork, they just carry on whinging for ever.

This was designed by a second year undergraduate at Kent.  The system contains
some 52 processes (42 to 47 simultaneously active), with 25 drawing on the
screen via a single SHARED channel (protected by a SEMAPHORE).

The system uses parallelism as a powerful design construct.  Its parallelism
was never motivated by performance considerations -- if you check the load
imposed on the UNIX system whilst running this code, you will see that it is
minimal.  For any who don't believe that parallelism simplifies design, the
challenge is to reproduce the behaviour of this demonstration using just
serial programming technniques -- any language!

The full sources for this occam program can be obtained by mailing me.  Kent
students, who have to do this for a programming exercise, should not apply.

Peter Welch (P.H.Welch@ukc.ac.uk).
(5th. December, 1996)