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digitalmars.D - Fortress

reply zwang <nehzgnaw gmail.com> writes:
Developed by Sun, Fortress is a new language intended to be a
successor to Fortran.  It has a bunch of interesting features
that may inspire the development of D.  For example, its support
for domain-specific language construction, more formal maths
expressions using Unicode characters (as discussed in this NG
before), extensible component system, native parallelism mecha-
nisms, multiple return values, and many more.

A draft of the language spec is available here:
http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/fortress0618.pdf
May 01 2005
parent reply bobef <bobef_member pathlink.com> writes:
And I guess it is slower than Java...

In article <d52sp0$2pen$1 digitaldaemon.com>, zwang says...

Developed by Sun, Fortress is a new language intended to be a
successor to Fortran.  It has a bunch of interesting features
that may inspire the development of D.  For example, its support
for domain-specific language construction, more formal maths
expressions using Unicode characters (as discussed in this NG
before), extensible component system, native parallelism mecha-
nisms, multiple return values, and many more.

A draft of the language spec is available here:
http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/fortress0618.pdf
May 01 2005
parent reply Norbert Nemec <Norbert Nemec-online.de> writes:
bobef schrieb:

 And I guess it is slower than Java...


I strongly doubt that: It is aimed to be for Fortran what D is for C++. 
The major strength of Fortran is performance...

The Fortress specs talk of a "virtual machine", but I'm pretty sure this 
will in no way harm the performance.

A first glipse tells me that Fortress should be taken serious as a 
Fortran successor, just like D should be taken serious as C++ successor. 
The only major drawback of Fortress that I can see right now is, that it 
does not aim at being a general purpose language. I would guess that it 
has good chances in the niche of numerics and high-performance 
computing, but it does not even seem to attempt going beyond that.
May 03 2005
parent =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Anders_F_Bj=F6rklund?= <afb algonet.se> writes:
Norbert Nemec wrote:


 And I guess it is slower than Java...


 
 I strongly doubt that: It is aimed to be for Fortran what D is for C++.
 The major strength of Fortran is performance... 

 The Fortress specs talk of a "virtual machine", but I'm pretty sure
 this will in no way harm the performance.

 A first glipse tells me that Fortress should be taken serious as a 
 Fortran successor, just like D should be taken serious as C++ successor. 


I thought that D was a C successor, and a simpler alternative to C++ ?
(I don't enough advanced C++ to tell whether it's a "full" replacement)

And I don't know Fortran, so I can't say much of the Fortress analogy.
However, it seems to aim to "do what Java did for C" - or so they say.


but there might be more opportunities for optimization in this language.


 The only major drawback of Fortress that I can see right now is, that it 
 does not aim at being a general purpose language. I would guess that it 
 has good chances in the niche of numerics and high-performance 
 computing, but it does not even seem to attempt going beyond that.


Their strategy seems to be different from what Walter chose for D :
"Wherever possible, consider whether a proposed language feature can
be provided by a library rather than having it wired into the compiler."

(http://research.sun.com/sunlabsday/docs/Talks/Track1/1.02_steele.pdf)

This is different from the D approach, which hardwires a lot of things ?
"D offers several capabilities built in to the core language that
are implemented as libraries in other languages such as C++"

(http://www.digitalmars.com/d/builtin.html)

And then Walter didn't even mention unit testing or contracts there...

Also:

- Booleans, integers, floats, characters are all objects (first-class)
- Libraries define math operators supplied by Unicode (i.e. Unicode ops)

Not even Java added that, but it kept the primitives and the ASCII ops ?

And D has kept with this tradition, as well. (i.e. the C/C++ tradition)
Even though object wrappers and unicode operators have been mentioned.
("suggestions" seems to come up on the newsgroup on a regular basis...)

--anders
May 03 2005