4 Basic Data Structures, Expressions and Statements

We first introduce the Oz's basic data structures and the Oz's expressions and statements to program with them. We concentrate on concepts rather than completeness.

A data-structure allows to store values of some (data) type and provides the standard procedures for compute with these values. Even though data structures are provided by all programming languages, they are not always provided the same way. All we say has to be complemented by The Oz Base Environment of the Mozart documentation.

We take the viewpoint of functional programming as in SML or Lisp which is quite distinct from that of constraint programming. However, functional programming provides a good platform for constraint programming. The idea of functional programming is to organize computation in terms of values, types, and functions between values of some types. Functions are interpreted as procedures computing the functional value for given arguments.

• 4.1 Statements versus Expressions

• 4.2 Values and Types

• 4.3 Expressions for Values

• 4.4 Variables, Scope, and Binding

• 4.5 Scoping in the Interactive User Interface

• 4.6 Inspecting Values and Types

• 4.7 Type Checks

• 4.8 Testing Equality

• 4.9 Procedures

• 4.10 Functions as Relations

• 4.11 Boolean Conditionals

• 4.12 Records

• 4.13 Tuples

• 4.14 Lists

• 4.15 Characters, Strings, and Virtual Strings

• 4.16 Loops

• 4.17 Pattern Matching and Conditionals

• 4.18 Towards State and Abstract Data Structures

• 4.19 Modules

• 4.20 Exercises

• 4.21 Program Collection