FortressThe "Next Java" is in the making. Fortress, a new programming language for scientific computing is being developed by a team of researchers led by Guy Steele, in Burlington, Massachusetts. The project, a Sun Labs effort to come up with a new design for high productivity computing systems, is being partly funded by DARPA (Information Processing Technology Office). The language, Guy Steele claims, will do for Fortan, what Java has done for C. The effort is focussed on High Productivity rather than High Performance - The difference? High performance is all about giving a problem to a machine and getting the answer, fast. With high productivity, the clock starts when you give the problem to the programmers. Similar to Java, some of features include - Extensive libraries, Platform Independence, Security Model (Type Safety), Dynamic Compilation, Catching "Stupid Mistakes" such as out-of-bound array references, null-pointer derefencing, premature storage deallocation etc. Fortress is designed to be a growable open language, with support for managing large projects, and distributed data/control models. Of particular note is the default parallelism of "loops". Fortress has various advances in syntax including Unicode support, enabling the code to look like mathematical expressions. Fortress focuses on the needs of programmers who work in mathematical disciplines and disciplines such as physics and chemistry that rely extensively on mathematics.[..] For starters, the code looks like math -- math the way it's written on a chalkboard, with square root signs and exponents placed above the line. Guy Steele (author of the Lambda papers, editor of the Hacker's Dictionary before ESR, co-creator of Scheme programming language, co-writer of the specifications for Java, '98 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award winner, etc.), is currently a researcher for Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming Language Research project. Links
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