DFKI Oz is an interactive implementation of Oz featuring a programming interface based on GNU Emacs, a concurrent browser, an object-oriented interface to Tcl/Tk, powerful interoperability features (sockets, C, C++), an incremental compiler, a garbage collector, and support for stand-alone applications. Performance is competitive with commercial Prolog and Lisp systems.
At any time, the user can enter expressions to be executed concurrently with already existing activities. Results can be reported in the browser or in user-defined windows. The browser is a concurrent display tool that shows the values of variables as soon as they become available. Expressions are entered through an interface realized with the Gnu Emacs Editor. One can start computations with partially described inputs and advance them stepwise by adding further information.
DFKI Oz comes with an object-oriented interface to Tcl/Tk, a powerful tool for programming graphical user interfaces. The functionality of all graphical objects comes in form of classes, which are subject to possibly multiple inheritance. Windows are described compositionally by means of object hierarchies and are subject to dynamic and interactive modification. The interface substitutes Oz for the low-level Tcl (an event-driven script language) exploiting concurrency, objects and first-class procedures. Nevertheless, one can freely integrate Tcl/Tk scripts if desired.
DFKI Oz comes with powerful interoperability features. High-level socket functionality is provided through predefined classes, making it straightforward to connect applications written in other languages, possibly running on different computers. Starting and controlling external processes is supported. Files are available through predefined classes. Unix functionality is available through a special interface. If necessary, the functionality of DFKI Oz can be extended by dynamically linking functions written in C and C++.
If DFKI Oz is installed on your system, you can start an interactive Oz demo by typing ozdemo to a shell. By graphical interaction you can play with many interesting demos illustrating different aspects of Oz. The source code of the demos is available through the DFKI Oz programming interface.
DFKI Oz is available for many platforms running Unix/X, including
Sparcs and 486 PCs. DFKI Oz can be obtained free by anonymous ftp from
ps-ftp.dfki.uni-saarland.de, or through the WWW from
http://ps-www.dfki.uni-saarland.de/