Here you're wrong. You have used this knowledge without noticing.
Well, actually that is what Tomasz is saying. He hasn't needed the
knowledge to write his programs. He has just learned how to use it...
and that's the whole point of syntactic sugar. If mozart would have only
provide procedures, programmers would complain that they also want to
use functions... ok, you create functions just as syntactic sugar, but
you don't tell that. As David said, that part goes to the reference manual.
When I was learning Oz, I found the tutorial and the reference manuals
quite satisfactory. There are bugs in there, but the overall quality is
not bad I think. It's a bit "compact" here and there, which is common in
the academic world, but, personally, I don't mind that (sometimes it's
probably convenient for both the author and the reader).
I've had been working with C++ and Java for over 10 years when I started
with Oz, only having touched Prolog and the like at the university. I
think that it's a matter of attitude, not only taste - Oz makes you
change your thinking and your programming habits, and while that hurts,
I think that it's *very* valuable. Tomasz, and all newcomers, don't be
afraid to invest the time to understand the stuff that you think you
don't need now - the reward might surprise you.
and also consider that Mozart is free software...
I'm so grateful for all this. I've learned so much, I got a free,
extensible and open-source CP environment, and I can see that so much
work has been done on this. It's not that it's all perfect, you can
always improve something, but Mozart already kicks ass as it is today.
Cheers,
Filip
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