"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, August 27, 2005

Oz Fest

Hop, skip, and jumping around... I'm taking another look at Oz, a "multiparadigm" language I took a brief look at a few years ago. Along with the book "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" my first look was brief and did not I did not appreciate everything about them.

I was originally put off by the shear number of capabilities in the language and presented in the book. On the other hand those capabilities fit together very well now that I am actually working through them.

OK, so the only real oddity is this: unary minus is represented as a tilde. And so...
~10
Should not read as "about ten" but rather "negative ten". This is the same as
0 - 10
using the Oz binary substraction operator, but -10 is invalid in Oz. I guess if that's the oddist thing...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just a quick plug for Dominic Fox's CTM Wiki. If you follow the links on Alice in the page, you'll find my translations of the Oz examples to Alice ML. Oz is very much a dynamic PL and Alice is very much a static PL (being an extension of SML).

Other than shameless self-promotion, the reason I mention this is that the tilde as unary minus is something that Oz has in common with ML. In ML, there was a concerted effort to minimize as much as possible operating overloading. Operating overloading which has a different arity was especially frowned upon.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.