DFKI Oz 1.0

Appeared in Volume 8/2, May 1995

Keywords: constraints, parallelism, OOP, functions.

The Programming Systems Lab of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is pleased to announce the release of DFKI Oz 1.0, an interactive compiler-based implementation of Oz.

Oz is a concurrent constraint programming language designed for applications that require complex symbolic computations, organization into multiple agents, and soft real-time control. It is based on a new computation model providing a uniform foundation for higher-order functional programming, constraint logic programming, and concurrent objects with multiple inheritance. From functional languages Oz inherits full compositionality, and from logic languages Oz inherits logic variables and constraints (including feature and finite domain constraints). Search in Oz is encapsulated (no backtracking) and includes one, best and all solution strategies.

DFKI Oz is an interactive implementation of Oz featuring a programming interface based on GNU Emacs, a concurrent browser, an object-oriented interface to Tcl/Tk, powerful interoperability features (sockets, C, C++), an incremental compiler, a garbage collector, and support for stand-alone applications. Performance is competitive with commercial Prolog and Lisp systems. DFKI Oz is available for many platforms running Unix/X, including Sparcs and 486 PCs.

Applications DFKI Oz has already been used for include simulations, multi-agent systems, natural language processing, virtual reality, graphical user interfaces, scheduling, placement problems, and configuration.

DFKI Oz is available by anonymous FTP from:
ftp://ps-ftp.dfki.uni-sb.de/pub/oz
or through the Web from:
http://ps-www.dfki.uni-sb.de/

Tutorials, reference manuals, and research papers are available from the same sources. You may start with "A Survey of Oz" (8 pages) and continue with "An Oz Primer" (110 pages).

For specific questions you may mail to oz@dfki.uni-sb.de. To join the Oz users mailing list, contact oz-users-request@dfki.uni-sb.de.

Gert Smolka
Programming Systems Lab
DFKI Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
Tel: +49 681 302 5311
Fax: +49 681 302 5341
Email: smolka@dfki.uni-sb.de
URL: http://ps-www.dfki.uni-sb.de/~smolka/