Fortress (programming language)

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Fortress is a draft specification for a 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.

It is intended to be a successor to Fortran, with improvements including Unicode support and concrete 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 have multiple syntactic stylesheets. Source code can be rendered as ASCII text, in Unicode, or 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 rich 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 programmer's liking rather than being built into the language.