Oz is a multiparadigm programming language, developed in the Programming Systems Lab at Université catholique de Louvain, for programming language education. It has a canonical textbook: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming.
Oz was first designed by Gert Smolka and his students in 1991. In 1996, development of Oz continued in cooperation with the research group of Seif Haridi and Peter Van Roy at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Since 1999, Oz has been continually developed by an international group, the Mozart Consortium, which originally consisted of Saarland University, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and the Université catholique de Louvain. In 2005, the responsibility for managing Mozart development was transferred to a core group, the Mozart Board, with the express purpose of opening Mozart development to a larger community.
The Mozart Programming System is the primary implementation of Oz. It is released with an open source license by the Mozart Consortium. Mozart has been ported to Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Oz contains most of the concepts of the major programming paradigms, including logic, functional (both lazy evaluation and eager evaluation), imperative, object-oriented, constraint, distributed, and concurrent programming. Oz has both a simple formal semantics (see chapter 13 of the book mentioned below) and Oz is a concurrency-oriented language, as the term was introduced by Joe Armstrong, the main designer of the Erlang language. A concurrency-oriented language makes concurrency easy to use and efficient. Oz supports a canonical graphical user interface (GUI) language QTk.
In addition to multi-paradigm programming, the major strengths of Oz are in constraint programming and distributed programming. Due to its factored design, Oz is able to successfully implement a network-transparent distributed programming model. This model makes it easy to program open, fault-tolerant applications within the language.