Sun's "Fortress" language

[Steve Horne]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:21:07 +0900, Bill Baxter
<dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote:

>Anyway, it looks kind of interesting.  This is supposedly actual 
>Fortress source code:
>    http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/faq/NAS-CG.pdf
>
>Looks pretty much like a LaTeX typeset algorithm.  So seems like you'll 
>need a fancy editor to program in Fortress.  FAQ says it uses unicode 
>symbols for variables and operators.

Interesting.

I've had the idea that programming languages should use more
sophisticated source documents than plain text for some time. It's
been a long time since the days when word processors used a plain text
view with special notations for style changes, and we all know that
WYSIWYG word processing works well, so why not get some similar
benefits for programmers - and I don't just mean syntax highlighting.

That said, I looked at this listing and it was pretty wierd. I suppose
part of that is the fact that the listing looks more like math than
code, though, which makes a lot of sense for a language taking on a
similar role to Fortran WRT numerical work.

It's not really a new idea, though. Mathematica has its own built in
programming language, and IIRC that is presented on screen formatted
like mathematical notation. The saved source files are plain text, but
this isn't quite the source as input by the user in mathematica -
there's a translation between the formatting-based syntax and plain
text equivalents, which is a pretty good idea. Exaggerating the
principle somewhat, it can be compared with OpenOffice which uses XML
files (which can be considered plain text) rather than binary files to
represent the on-screen/page formatting - the two representations of
the document are not the same, but they do represent the same thing.

Mathematica uses a much simpler translation to plain text than XML,
which is much easier and much more practical to edit in a text editor,
and that is the kind of thing I'd like to see in a programming
language that uses formatting as part of its syntax.

-- 
Remove 'wants' and 'nospam' from e-mail.