Fortress is a draft specification for a new programming language currently developed by Sun Microsystems as part of a DARPA-funded supercomputing initiative. One of the language designers is Guy L. Steele, Jr., whose previous work includes Scheme and Java. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems. ... Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. ... The Scheme programming language is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. ... Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...

It is intended to be a successor to Fortran, with improvements including Unicode support and code syntax that is similar to mathematical notation. The language is not designed to be similar to Fortran. Syntactically, it most resembles Scala, Standard ML, and Haskell. Fortress is being designed from the outset to be renderable. By which, source code is displayed not just as ASCII text, but as a prettied image. This will allow for support of mathematical symbols and other symbols in the rendered output for easier reading. Fortress is also designed to be both highly parallel and have as much functionality contained within libraries, drawing from Java but taken to a higher degree. For example, the 'for' loop is a parallel operation, which will not always iterate in a strictly linear manner depending on the underlying software and hardware. However, the 'for' loop is a library function and can be replaced by another 'for' loop of the programmers liking rather than being built into the language. Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a statically typed, compiled, programming language originally developed in the 1950s and still heavily used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... Mathematical notation is used in mathematics, and throughout the physical sciences, engineering, and economics. ... Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. ... Standard ML (SML) is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. ... Haskell is a standardized pure functional programming language with non-strict semantics, named after the logician Haskell Curry. ...

External links

• Sun's Programming Language Research Group
• The Fortress Language Specification (latest version is 1.0 Alpha) [PDF]
• Fortress FAQ
• Fortress Tutorial Slides
• Fortress Interest Mailing List
• Lambda the Ultimate article