2.1.5 What is Oz and who is Mozart?

A concurrent constraint programming system provides a set of procedures for defining propagators and all machinery for running propagation and distribution. The programmer simply models his problem by defining sets of propagators and a strategy for distribution. The rest is done by the compiler and emulator of the programming system.

Oz is a concurrent constraint programming language which has been developed by the Programming Systems Lab in Saarbrücken led by Gert Smolka. The most recent Oz system is Mozart 1.2.0. The Mozart system was developed by the Mozart consortium which comprises the programming systems lab in Saarbrücken, the programming systems lab at SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science) led by Seif Haridi, and Peter Van Roy's group at the Universite catholique de Louvain. The Mozart system is freely available, extensively documented, and fully operational.

Oz unifies ideas originating from logic programming in Prolog and functional programming in Lisp or SML. Mozart provides the most innovative technology compared to other constraint programming languages on the market (ILOG, CHIP). This makes Mozart a good foundation for building innovative applications in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Beyond concurrent constraint programming, Mozart supports Internet programming similar to Java. Mozart is also well-suited for building multi agent systems and sophisticated graphical user interfaces.