The CCITT Specification and Description Language is widely accepted as a standard for use in the design of software in the telecommunications industry. This paper considers the implementation of this language on transputers using Occam. This raises some common issues in the use of Occam. The paper presents a novel implementation that demonstrates the performance gain that can be achieved through judicious use of the constructs available in Occam. The transputer implementation of Occam does not suit the authors' requirements and forces them to adopt a different coding, which is more conventional and much less efficient.