Oz is a multi-paradigm programming language, developed in the Programming Systems Lab at Saarland University.
Oz was first designed by Gert Smolka and his students in 1991. In 1996 the development of Oz continued in cooperation with the research group of Seif Haridi at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Since 1999, Oz has been continually developed by an international group, the Mozart Consortium, that originally consisted of Saarland University, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and the Université catholique de Louvain. In 2005, the responsibility for managing Mozart development was transferred to a core group, the Mozart Board, with the express purpose of opening Mozart development to a larger community.
Oz has a high-quality implementation, the Mozart Programming System, which is released with an Open Source license by the Mozart Consortium. Mozart has been ported to different flavors of Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.
Language features
Oz contains in a simple and well-factored way most of the concepts of the major programming paradigms, including logic, functional (both lazy and eager), imperative, object-oriented, constraint, distributed, and concurrent programming. Oz has both a simple formal semantics (see chapter 13 of the book mentioned below) and an efficient implementation, the Mozart Programming System (see below). Oz is a concurrency-oriented language, as the term was introduced by Joe Armstrong, the main designer of the Erlang language. A concurrency-oriented language makes concurrency both easy to use and efficient.
In addition to multi-paradigm programming, the major strengths of Oz are in constraint programming and distributed programming. Because of its factored design, Oz is able to successfully implement a network-transparent distributed programming model. This model makes it easy to program open, fault-tolerant applications within the language. For constraint programming, Oz introduces the idea of computation spaces, which allows user-defined search and distribution strategies that are orthogonal to the constraint ___domain.
References
- Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi (2004). Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. MIT Press. There is online supporting material for this book. The book is an introduction to the principles of programming languages that uses Oz as its preferred idiom for examples.
See also
- Alice, the concurrent functional constraint programming language from Saarland University
External links
- The Mozart Programming System
- Tutorial of Oz
- Open Directory: Oz
- Programming Language Research at UCL: One of the core developers of Mozart/Oz, this group does research using Mozart/Oz as the vehicle
- Multiparadigm Programming in Mozart/Oz: Proceedings of MOZ 2004: Conference that gives a snapshot of the work being done with Mozart/Oz