Motivation for teaching/learning occam

We can discuss whether occam, as a programming language, is a dead end when it comes to preparation for working in the industry after finishing education. However, the reason for including occam in the real-time programming subject primarily that it represents a different way of thinking about threads and synchronization: The language itself is very simple and it has a theoretical fundament in CSP. Thereby we achieve both that implementation of the different "synchronization patterns" becomes simple, and that it becomes easier to reason about implemented programs. - Fewer surprises :-)

When that is said; I believe that the occam to C translator (SPoC) represents a large potential for the real-time systems of, say, intermediate complexity - between the simple ones where you base the implementation on your own non-preemptive scheduler, and the large and complex ones where you depend on the infrastructure of a commercial real-time operating system. You handle the threads and synchronization parts of the program in occam, and build/use C modules to achieve abstraction...