Sun's "Fortress" language

[Bill Baxter]

Many of you probably already saw this on Slashdot, but apparently Sun's 
working on some sort of "Fortran-killer" by the name of Fortress.
   http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/
I know there are a few others here who are interested in numerical 
computing so I thought I'd repost it here.  Guy Steele, Jr. is the 
principal investigator behind the project.  Wasn't he a big Lisp guy?

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.

Looks like it's still in the very early stages.  The language is meant 
to be cross-platform, but their current implementation targets "the JVM".

--bb