Oz Multiparadigm Concurrent Programming Language, The

I’m not sure about you, but to me Oz looks like a cool programming language to learn… and use:

Oz is a multiparadigm programming language, developed in the Programming Systems Lab at Saarland University.

Oz contains 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. 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. Due to 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”; these allow user-defined search and distribution strategies orthogonal to the constraint domain.

See it in action on my computer:

Far from bad, eh?

The language is pretty nice and clean, yet has advanced built-in features like concurrency… whoa…

thread
   Z = X+Y     % will wait until both X and Y are bound to a value.
   {Browse Z}  % shows the value of Z.
end
thread X = 40 end
thread Y = 2 end

The primary tool for developing Oz applications is Mozart Programming System.

So, now, anything interesting? 😉