Available at: http://www.mozart-oz.org
Systems supported: Many Unix-based platforms, Windows 95/98/NT
Developers:
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Universitat des Saarlandes (UdS)
Swedish Institute of Computer Science(SICS)
Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL)
The Mozart consortium (DFKI & UdS & SFB 378, SICS, UCL) is pleased to announce the release of Mozart 1.0, a major development platform for logic programming, constraint programming, and distributed programming. Mozart implements the Oz language and is the fruit of a
decade of research into concurrent constraint, logic, and distributed programming. The platform is released with a very liberal license (BSD style) that allows both commercial and non-commercial use. Full source code is available. There is extensive documentation including a full set of tutorials and reference manuals, and many demos. Performance is competitive with commercial Prolog and Lisp systems.
We compare the logic and constraint programming abilities of Mozart with Prolog-like languages. In our experience, there are two essentially different styles of declarative logic programming, which can be called the 'algorithmic' (or 'directed') style and the 'free' (or 'undirected') style, depending on whether the programmer knows the control flow or not. Prolog provides a single resolution strategy to support both, which makes programming awkward in each one. Oz explicitly distinguishes between the two and provides powerful support for each. In addition, Oz provides four constraint systems, higher-orderness, concurrency, and state.
While Prolog uses a reflective operator-based syntax (same syntax for program and data), Oz has powerful scanner and parser generator tools. In the algorithmic style, the programmer knows the control flow completely. Much Prolog code is written in this style. Mercury is targeted for this style only. The programmer specifies both the declarative semantics and the complete operational semantics of the program. InProlog, the latter is determined by the order of clauses and goals within clauses. The programmer has to be careful to avoid unwanted choice points, for example by using green cuts. With 'freeze', a little bit of concurrency is possible, but there is no preemptive concurrency.
In the free style, the programmer knows the inference rules and logical constraints of the problem, but does not know much about the control flow. The free style is used often in constraint programming, theorem proving, and computational linguistics.Usually, the programmer specifies the problem's logical constraints, purely declaratively, and then separately specifies the inference (or search,or resolution) strategy.The strategy gives partial information about the operational semantics. Prolog is quite weak for specifying the strategy; a logic programming language intended for the free style usually extends Prolog in substantial ways.
Languages such as CHIP, Prolog-IV, clp(FD), cc(FD), etc., fall in this category.
Oz supports well both styles of declarative programming. For the algorithmic
style, a typical Oz construct is 'cond C then S1 else S2 end' (and its syntactic
short-cuts, 'if' and 'case') where C is a constraint and S1, S2 are statements.
The 'cond' has a precise logical meaning '(C /\ S1) \/ (not C /\ S2)' as well
as a precise operational meaning: wait until either C or not C can be
determined, then execute one alternative.
For the free style, Oz uses just two basic concepts: first-class computation
spaces and determinacy-driven disjunctions (Andorra-style). Using these concepts
allows to efficiently program the resolution strategy from within Oz. The system provides powerful tools and libraries based on this approach.
For example, the Oz Explorer, an interactive tool that allows to visualize
and control the search strategy, is built in this way.
In addition to logic programming, Mozart provides:
- Four constraint systems: rational trees (as in modern Prologs),
finite domains, record constraints, and finite sets of integers.
- Higher-orderness: procedures are first-class with lexical scoping, as in functional languages. This allows programs to be compacter (less repetition of code) and supports data
abstraction.
- Concurrency: lightweight preemptive threads. Many thousands of threads can be easily created.
- State: a powerful object system with multiple inheritance and first-class classes, methods, and attributes.
- Distribution: full support for open fault-tolerant
network-transparent distributed computing. For example, it is trivial
to create applets or CGI servlets that do constraint solving
and logical inferencing.
- Tools: an extensive set of tools, libraries, and a powerful C++
interface.
References:
1. Seif Haridi, Peter Van Roy, Per Brand, Christian Schulte, "Programming
Languages for Distributed Applications",
New Generation Computing, May 1998, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 223-261.
2. Gert Smolka, "The Oz Programming Model", Computer Science Today,
Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol.
1000, 1995, pp. 324-343.
3. Peter Van Roy, Seif Haridi, Per Brand, Gert Smolka, Michael Mehl,
Ralf Scheidhauer, "Mobile Objects in Distributed Oz", ACM Transactions
on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Sept. 1997, pp. 804-851.
4. Seif Haridi, Peter Van Roy, Per Brand, Michael Mehl, Ralf Scheidhauer, Gert
Smolka, "Efficient Logic Variables for Distributed Computing", ACM
Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 1999
(to appear).
5. Per Brand, Peter Van Roy, Raphael Collet, Erik Klintskog, "A Fault-Tolerant
Mobile State Protocol and Its Language Interface",
1999 (in preparation).
6. Joerg Wuertz, "Contraint-Based Scheduling in Oz", Operations Research Proceedings, Springer Verlag, 1996.
7. Christian Schulte, "Programming Constraint Inference Engines",
Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Springer Verlag, 1997.
Contact addresses:
Seif Haridi
+46 (8) 633-1500
seif@sics.se
Christian Schulte
+49 (681) 302-5340
schulte@ps.uni-sb.de
Peter Van Roy
+32 (10) 47.83.74
pvr@info.ucl.ac.be