Orca, the programming language almost synonymous with the operating system Amoeba (other than Python, which also started on Amoeba), is designed for use on distributed systems. This essentially means that several computers come together – similar to Seti@Home – to create a single, giant supercomputer.

But the parallel with S@H isn’t exact – the coming together under Orca and Amoeba (as well as other operating systems, such as Solaris) – is intended to be seamless, creating an environment where you concentrate on writing the program to do the task you want done, rather than ensuring that the system is entirely parallel, judging which bits should be in which object and then testing to make sure the parallelism works.

Orca started as a PhD project in about 1986, by Ceriel Jacobs, under the supervision of operating systems guru Andy Tanenbaum. The language is modeled around shared objects – meaning that using object oriented programming (which is the most popular paradigm in this day and age) makes your programming immediately parallel, should the system support it.

The language is most similar to Modula-2 (and therefore also similar to Pascal, Delphi and Oberon, I suppose).

You can read the reference manual online, read the user manual online, or download the compiler for Solaris or Amoeba. Sorry, there isn’t a Windows version (for Linux, you can compile from sources).

Tags: Amoeba, Orca, parallel programming

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