# 1 General Information

## 1.1 What is Mozart?

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.

## 1.2 What is Oz?

Oz is a concurrent object-oriented programming language with dataflow synchronization. Like Java, it is ``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...

## 1.3 Why is it called Oz (resp. Mozart)?

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## 1.4 Is there a WWW page for Mozart?

Yes, the primary WWW site for Mozart is located at the Programming Systems Lab of the the university of the Saarland in Germany: http://www.mozart-oz.org/ Another site is located at SICS, the Swedish Institute of COmputer Science: http://www.sics.se/mozart/

## 1.5 How do I get documentation on Mozart?

There is a lot of documentation for Mozart: tutorials, demos, and reference manuals. This documentation is available on-line from the Mozart sites, see e. g. http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/.

You can also download the full documentation package and install it on your computer. See the on-line Dowload Instructions for details.

## 1.6 Is the documentation available on the WWW

Yes it is, see Section 1.5

## 1.7 How to I download and install the system?

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 Dowload Instructions for details.

## 1.8 What platforms are supported?

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:

## 1.9 Are there newgroups or mailing-lists devoted to Mozart?

## 1.10 Is there a CVS server for Mozart?

Yes, there is. All our sources are accessible through our anonymous CVS server. First you need to login with CVS password `anoncvs`:

> `% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de:/CVS login
> (Logging in to anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de)
> CVS password: anoncvs`

You only need to do this once since cvs then correspondingly updates your `~/.cvspass` file. Then you cvan retrieve the complete sources with the command below:

> `% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@ps.uni-sb.de:/CVS get mozart`

Further instructions about getting the sources from CVS, configuring, and building the distribution are available in ``Installation Manual''.

## 1.11 Are there licensing or copyright restrictions on Mozart?

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 License Statemen for precise wording.

## 1.12 What is Mozart good for?

Mozart particularly excels in two domains:

1. 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.

2. 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.

   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.

Mozart is also excellent at general programming tasks. For example, all our documentation is processed by `ozdoc` which is written in Oz.