Casen

Casen is a programming language that was developed in the 1970s by a team at the Naval Ship Engineering Center in Port Hueneme, California. The language was designed for use in real-time distributed systems, particularly in the context of networking and real-time data processing.

The core philosophy behind Casen was to provide a simple, efficient, and modular language that could be used to build large-scale systems. Casen was notable for its support of task-level concurrency, which allowed multiple tasks to run concurrently within the same program. This feature was especially useful for systems that required rapid response times and high throughput.

Casen was based on a backus normalization form 3 (BNF 3) grammar, which is a grammatical notation system. The language featured a simple syntax and a fixed-width instruction set. Casen programs were executed on a virtual machine, which provided a high degree of abstraction and allowed the language to be platform-independent.

Despite its innovative design, Casen never gained widespread adoption. However, the language did have an impact on the development of later programming languages, such as Occam and Alef. Many of the features and design principles that Casen introduced, including task-level concurrency and BNF grammar, were later incorporated into other programming languages.

Today, Casen is largely of historical interest, and it is no longer actively maintained or used. However, it remains an important example of a 1970s programming language, and its design and features continue to be studied by researchers and programmers interested in the history of computer science and programming languages.