Alice Programming System Released

[Peter Van Roy]

rlpowell at digitalkingdom.org wrote:
> 
> I notice that many of the people involved in Mozart-Oz are also involved
> in Alice.  I would very much appreciate pointers to information as to
> why you all felt this new language was necessary, what reasons a user
> might have for switching to Alice, and whether this represents a schism
> in the Mozart-Oz community or not.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> -Robin

Well, I don't know if we can talk about schism.  Alice is complementary
to Oz, while staying interoperable.  Alice concentrates on static typing,
whereas Mozart-Oz development concentrates on functionality.  Alice is a
young language, whereas Oz has been fairly stable for a few years now.
Alice development is located at Saarland University, whereas Oz has
four (or five?) development sites.

Oz is a living language.  We are working on correcting some problems with
the original design and addressing new problems.  For example, one major 
correction that is brewing is related to the concept of declarative
concurrency and the role of ByNeed synchronization (known misleadingly as 
'futures').  The current ByNeed in Mozart-Oz is broken from the viewpoint
of declarative concurrency.

Another area of development is high-level abstractions for user interface
programming.

A third area, and not the least, is network-transparent distribution and
its extensions to decentralized (peer-to-peer) distribution and
capability-based security.

I don't know if Alice will or should follow all these developments.
Personally, I think it would be very interesting if Alice could stay
interoperable with Oz and incorporate the new functionality from Oz as
it appears.

Peter

-- 
Peter Van Roy
Département d'Ingénierie Informatique
(Department of Computing Science and Engineering)
Université catholique de Louvain
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Email: pvr at info.ucl.ac.be
Tel: (+32) (10) 47.83.74
Mobile: (+32) 485 42 46 77
Web: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/cvvanroy.html
Mozart: http://www.mozart-oz.org
-
Please send submissions to users at mozart-oz.org
and administriva mail to users-request at mozart-oz.org.
The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.
Please send bug reports to bugs at mozart-oz.org.