Sun's "Fortress" language

[Ralf Schneider]

> 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.

If you look at the Fortress slides at: 
http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf
you will see there exists a pure ascii version of the same file. IMHO the 
mapping from ASCII to the typed document is were well done.

But anyway, I can not imagine such a language would be used in wide areas. 
It looks to "Mathematic". And in addition I have doubts a more complex 
formating tool than a text editor is very productive. May be someday a real 
/ useful  graphical programming tool will be born, but it's probably a long 
way until there.