I began this project: https://github.com/codeassociates/occam2go as an experiment to see if LLM coding could help test that idea. Also, the project seemed like a worthy challenge in light of comments I'd read around the recent Anthropic "Claude-written C compiler" announcement. Those comments said that an LLM can write a C compiler easily because there are many C compilers in its training data. Since there's little to no Occam in today's LLM training data sets (GitHub doesn't even recognize it as a distinct language) this project should be impossible for an LLM, right? (Spoiler: wrong).

Every line of code in the repo was LLM-generated. The transpiler currently builds and runs its test suite Occam programs, a number of old Occam demo/example programs and the Conway game of life Occam program from the 1988 book "Programming in Occam2". I'd be interested to hear if it can run other Occam code that may be out there somewhere. Almost all of the Occam2 language should be supported, albeit with some limitations such as PRI PAR not actually delivering priority semantics at runtime.

There's also a short article that links to the more interesting Claude sessions recorded during the project: https://codeassociates.github.io/conversations-with-claude/c...