Fortress

[PaulButler]

Has anyone heard of fortress? It is a new programming language from Sun that looks like it will be quite interesting. Its influences include Scala, O'Caml, and Scheme. Although Sun does not say if it will be functional, it seems it will be from it's influences and the coding style. It is written in unicode instead of ascii (which means more mathematical characters), it is designed for performance on multiprocessor systems, code can be converted to LaTeX markup, and lots of other cool features.

Here is a link: http://fortress.sunsource.net/

[Cervantes]

Sounds pretty cool. Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Also, I fixed your wikipedia link. It seems the url tag doesn't work if the url has parentheses in it, so I changed them to %28 and %29, respectively.

[rizzix]

I don't think its new. I've seen this before, its just that now its in the public domain. (it was in the research labs before). And.. I'm not sure but i think its supposed to be just a research language (i.e not a practical programming language).

btw: Java is unicode too. (nothing new there)

[PaulButler]

Thanks Cervantes.

rizzix @ Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:18 pm wrote:

I don't think its new. I've seen this before, its just that now its in the public domain. (it was in the research labs before). And.. I'm not sure but i think its supposed to be just a research language (i.e not a practical programming language).

btw: Java is unicode too. (nothing new there)

I think it was announced publicly last September (IIRC), but I only heard about it a few days ago. It is still in alpha (again, IIRC). I have seen the presentations and specifications; it builds on a lot of academic research but it is aimed to be a practical language.

edit: oh, and by unicode I don't mean the strings can have unicode, I mean you can use operators and variable names from the unicode character set. If java can do this I certainly haven't seen it done.

[rizzix]

Yea java programs can use a huge subset of unicode characters for method/class/variable names etc. It was designed to be adopted easily world wide. So they couldn't just support the American English subset of characters and instead opted for UTF8 unicode.

Some characters are definitely illegal for use in certain context and java operators are definitely standardized (fixed). Other than that, its definitely possbile to use unicode to code in java.


And yea, there were a lot of paper/presentations while Fortress was in the research labs. So if that's the reasoning behind your logic, it may not necessarily be a practical programming language. :p