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

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

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.

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.

The performance is provided by Just-In-Time compilation (like Java/C#),
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