[Mozart Oz Users] Mozart documentation -- proposal to simplify it

[Peter Van Roy]

Fred Mesnard writes:

> I am rather happy with the tutorial because it's a small
> document I can give to my students (as a paper version).
> Moreover, it is the right thing for an introductory course
> of 25 hours (I'll try to add a bit of distributed programming).

Yes, this seems to be the consensus here also.  There is actually
the need for a small, polished document, in the style of the
tutorial.  (BTW, if you or someone else would have the time to
clean up the tutorial, we would greatly appreciate it!)

> On the other hand, I had a look on the (already big) book,
> which I found fascinating at first sight. I'll plan to propose to
> my colleagues to use Oz as the main language for
> teaching those programming concepts, rather
> than switching to different languages, which
> implies a big waste of time fighting with different
> syntax. Of course, I'm not sure that they'll agree.

Good luck with the proposal!

> By the way, we have many Macs here.  Do you
> plan to port Mozart on Mac Os X ?

I have/had plans, but they are blocked by the lack of a tcl/tk
port to the Mac.  Now that Donatien Grolaux is working on QHTML
(using the graphics toolkit of Dynamic HTML, in the latest
browsers), this problem might go away, at least in part (all the
non-Tk dependent parts of Mozart would run on a Mac).

The sources are, as far as I know, compilable on a Mac.

> My conclusion: anyway, it could be a good idea
> to keep a small informal document to grasp
> the multi-essence of Oz !
> 
> Fred

Yes, absolutely.

Peter


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