Ozma: Extending Scala With Oz Concurrency

I want to go through this to understand it better.  The "Unusual Syntax" sounds like a major hurdle and most of these feartures probably could be added to more traditional languages.  C++, JAVA, RUBY, PERL, etc.



From Slashdot: Announcing Ozma: Extending Scala With Oz Concurrency

"Programming for concurrency makes sense in developing for both large scales (cloud computing) and small (multicore CPUs). Some languages were designed for concurrency and distribution; One of those languages is Oz, which provides advanced primitives regarding concurrency and distribution. Oz is mostly declarative, a paradigm that encompasses functional and logic programming. Despite its innovative features and expressiveness, Oz never made it into the wide developer community; one reason is its unusual syntax." Read on to learn about an effort to bring Oz's concurrency features to more programmers. setori88 continues: "But first, some background: Martin Odersky, in designing the Scala programming language, recognized the need for community acceptance of the kind that Oz lacked. He designed Scala as being both close to Java (in terms of syntax and concepts) and interoperable with existing Java libraries. Today, Scala seems to be the best hope for making functional programming accessible to programmers.

Although Scala has no language feature related to concurrency, the advanced library Akka, inspired by Erlang, provides Scala programmers with concurrent and distributed concepts.

Now comes a project attempting to popularize the concurrency concepts of Oz, called Ozma. Ozma implements the full Scala specification and runs on the Mozart VM. It extends Scala with dataflow variables, declarative concurrency, lazy declarative concurrency, and message-passing concurrency based on ports. Ozma extends the duality of Scala, namely the combination of functional and object styles, to concurrent programming."

The Mozart Programming System
http://www.mozart-oz.org/ The Mozart Programming System is an advanced development platform for intelligent, distributed applications. The system is the result of a decade of research in programming language design and implementation, constraint-based inference, distributed computing, and human-computer interfaces.

Mozart is based on the Oz language, which supports declarative programming, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency as part of a coherent whole. For distribution, Mozart provides a true network transparent implementation with support for network awareness, openness, and fault tolerance. Mozart supports multi-core programming with its network transparent distribution and is an ideal platform for both general-purpose distributed applications as well as for hard problems requiring sophisticated optimization and inferencing abilities. We have developed many applications including sophisticated collaborative tools, multi-agent systems, and digital assistants, as well as applications in natural language understanding and knowledge representation, in scheduling and time-tabling, and in placement and configuration.