<!--
  - Authors:
  -   Denys Duchier     <duchier@ps.uni-sb.de>
  -   Leif Kornstaedt <kornstae@ps.uni-sb.de>
  -   Christian Schulte <schulte@ps.uni-sb.de>
  -
  - Copyright:
  -   Denys Duchier, 1998
  -   Leif Kornstaedt, 1998
  -   Christian Schulte, 1998
  -
  - Last change:
  -   $Date: 1999/01/21 09:52:51 $ by $Author: schulte $
  -   $Revision: 1.6 $
  -
  - This file is part of Mozart, an implementation
  - of Oz 3
  -    http://www.mozart-oz.org
  -
  - See the file "LICENSE" or
  -    http://www.mozart-oz.org/LICENSE.html
  - for information on usage and redistribution
  - of this file, and for a DISCLAIMER OF ALL
  - WARRANTIES.
  -
  -->

<!DOCTYPE BOOK SYSTEM "ozdoc.dtd" [

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<book>
  <front>
    <meta name="html.split" value="chapter.general.info">
    <meta name="html.split" value="chapter.programming">
    <meta name="html.split" value="chapter.language">
    <title/The Mozart FAQ/
    <author.Extern to="author.db" key="Denys.Duchier">
  </front>
  <body>
    <chapter id=chapter.general.info>
	<title/General Information/

      <section>
	  <title/What is Mozart?/
	<p>Mozart is a programming system providing state-of-the-art
support especially in two areas: constraint-based problem solving and
open distributed computing.  Mozart implements the Oz language and
provides libraries, tools, and a complete development environment.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is Oz?/
	<p>Oz is a concurrent object-oriented programming language
with dataflow synchronization.  Like Java, it is <q/write once, run
everywhere/ and provides automatic local and distributed garbage
collection.  Oz is based on the concurrent constraint programming
paradigm.  Aarghh! I don't want to write this entry...</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Why is it called Oz (resp. Mozart)?/
	<p>???</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Is there a WWW page for Mozart?/
	<p>Yes, the primary WWW site for Mozart is located at the
Programming Systems Lab of the the university of the Saarland in
Germany:
<ref.extern
to="http://www.mozart-oz.org/">http://www.mozart-oz.org/</ref.extern>
Another site is located at SICS, the Swedish Institute of COmputer
Science:
<ref.extern
to="http://www.sics.se/mozart/">http://www.sics.se/mozart/</ref.extern></p>
      </section>

      <section id=get.doc>
	  <title/How do I get documentation on Mozart?/
	<p>There is a lot of documentation for Mozart: tutorials,
demos, and reference manuals.  This documentation is available on-line
from the Mozart sites, see &eg; <ref.extern to
="http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/"
>http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/</ref.extern>.</p>
	<p>You can also download the full documentation package and
install it on your computer.  See the on-line
<ref.extern to="http://www.mozart-oz.org/download/index.html"
>Dowload Instructions</ref.extern> for details.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Is the documentation available on the WWW/
	<p>Yes it is, see <ptr to=get.doc></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/How to I download and install the system?/
	<p>The Mozart system is available (1) as binary tarballs for
various Unix platforms, (2) as a self-extracting archive for Windows
95/98/NT, (3) as RPM packages for Linux, (4) as source tarballs, (5)
as source obtained directly from our anonymous CVS server. Please
consult the on-line
<ref.extern to="http://www.mozart-oz.org/download/index.html"
>Dowload Instructions</ref.extern> for details.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What platforms are supported?/
	<p>The Mozart system is known to run on most flavors of Unix
as well as on Windows 95/98/NT.  It has been successfully built and
installed on the following platforms:

</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Are there newgroups or mailing-lists devoted to
Mozart?/
	<p>
</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Is there a CVS server for Mozart?/
	<p>Yes, there is.  All our sources are accessible through our
anonymous CVS server.  First you need to login with CVS password
<code proglang=sh/anoncvs/:
<code display proglang=fundamental>
% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de:/CVS login
(Logging in to anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de)
CVS password: anoncvs
</code>
You only need to do this once since cvs then correspondingly updates
your <file>~/.cvspass</file> file.  Then you cvan retrieve the
complete sources with the command below:
<code display proglang=sh>
% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de:/CVS get mozart
</code>
Further instructions about getting the sources from CVS, configuring,
and building the distribution are available in <ptr.extern
to="ozdoc:install">.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Are there licensing or copyright restrictions on
Mozart?/
	<p>No, Mozart is released with a very liberal license.  You
can basically do anything you want with it and, as usual, we decline
any responsibility.  Please consult the <ref.extern
to="http://www.mozart-oz.org/LICENSE.html">License
Statemen</ref.extern> for precise wording.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is Mozart good for?/
	<p>Mozart particularly excels in two domains:
<list enum>
	    <item><em/Constraint-Based Problem Solving:/
Mozart is the result of 10 years of research and
development in concurrent constraint programming. It implements
Oz , a powerful constraint language with logic variables,
record constraints, finite domains, and finite sets. The
system is competitive in performance with state-of-the-art
commercial solutions, but is much more expressive
and flexible, providing 1st-class computation spaces, programmable
search strategies, a GUI for the interactive exploration of search
trees, and allows to implement efficient constraint systems from
scratch.</item>

	    <item><em/Open Distributed Computing:/
Mozart is the result of 3 years of research and development in open
distributed computing, involving an international collaboration
between the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI),
the University of the Saarland in Germany, the Swedish
Institute for Computer Science (SICS), and the Universite catholique
de Louvain (at Louvain-la-Neuve) in Belgium.
<p>
The Mozart system is an ideal platform for open distributed computing:
it makes the network completely transparent. The illusion of a common
store is extended across multiple sites and automatically supported by
very efficient protocols. In addition, full control is retained over
network communication patterns, permitting very efficient use of
network resources. Furthermore, reliable, fault tolerant applications
can easily be developed.</p>
	    </item>
	  </list>
Mozart is also excellent at general programming tasks.  For example,
all our documentation is processed by <code proglang=sh/ozdoc/ which
is written in Oz.
</p>
      </section>

    </chapter>

    <chapter id=chapter.programming>
	<title/Programming with Mozart/

      <section>
	  <title/Is there a source code level debugger with
breakpoints, etc?/
	<p>Yes, the debugger is called ozcar and is documented in
<ptr.extern to="ozdoc:ozcar">.  It has a graphical interface and
uses the Emacs editor to display and highlight the source code that is
being executed.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What GUI toolkits are available?/
	<p>Mozart comes with a high-level object-oriented interface to
Tcl/Tk.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Can modules mutually import each other?/
	<p>Yes, there is no problem.  Modules are loaded by need and
concurrently.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Are there database interfaces?/
	<p>Yes, so far we offer two interfaces as <q/contributions/:
(1) a GDBM interface and (2) a PostgresSQL interface.  Feel free to
contribute more or better interfaces.</p>
      </section>
    </chapter>

    <chapter id=chapter.language>
	<title/Language and design issues/

      <section>
	  <title/Why is the syntax so weird?/
	<p>The most unusual thing about the syntax is the choice of
curly braces for procedure application. Once you get used to that you
can be rather comfortably puzzled by other things.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz have garbage collection?/
	<p>Yes, Oz has automatic garbage collection (2 space copying
GC).  For open distributed computing applications, it also implements
automatic distributed GC, but, at present, not all distributed cyclic
datastructures can be collected successfully.</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is constraint programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Can I also have state?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is multi-paradigm programming?/
	<p>Multi-paradigm programming is the freedom to choose and mix
programming paradigms according to your tastes and needs.  Unlike most
other programming languages which lock you into a single programming
paradigm, Oz unifies into one simple and coherent framework the
functional, object-oriented, and logic flavors of programming. This is
possible due to the very general and powerful underlying paradigm of
concurrent constraint programming.</p>
      </section>

      <section proglang=oz>
	  <title/Does Oz support object-oriented programming?/
	<p>Yes, Oz supports the class/instance model for
object-oriented programming.  A class is created &eg; as follows:
<code display>
declare
class Foo
   attr val
   meth init(V) val<-V end
   meth show {Show foo(val: @val)} end
end
</code>
An instance is created using procedure <code/New/ applied to class
<code/Foo/ and initial message <code/init(12)/ for example:
<code display/declare O = {New Foo init(12)}/
Object <code/O/ can be applied to message <code/show/ as follows:
<code display/{O show}/
which, in this case causes <code/foo(val: 12)/ to be printed.</p>
<p>A point of terminology:
we speak of object application rather than of message sending.
</p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz support functional programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz support logic programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz support modular programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz support concurrent programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Does Oz support distributed programming?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/Can I do backtracking?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is a computation space?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/How do I program a search problem?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	<title/Why is <code proglang=oz/[]/ not the empty list/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is the meaning of the <code proglang=oz/$/
marker/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is the meaning of the <code proglang=oz/,/
marker/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What datatypes does Oz provide?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is a basic constraint?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is a non-basic constraint?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

      <section>
	  <title/What is a propagator?/
	<p></p>
      </section>

    </chapter>

  </body>
</book>
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