Wikipedia

Fortress (programming language)

Fortressis a discontinued experimentalprogramming languageforhigh-performance computing,created bySun Microsystemswith funding fromDARPA'sHigh Productivity Computing Systemsproject. One of the language designers wasGuy L. Steele Jr.,whose previous work includesScheme,Common Lisp,andJava.

Fortress
DeveloperSun Labs
First appeared2006
Final release
1.0_5033 / September 7, 2011;13 years ago(2011-09-07)
Typing disciplineStatic
PlatformJava SE1.6+
OSCross-platform
LicenseBSD
Websitegithub.com/stokito/fortress-lang
Influenced by
Fortran,Scala,Haskell

Design

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The name "Fortress" was intended to connote a secureFortran,i.e., "a language for high-performance computation that provides abstraction and type safety on par with modern programming language principles".[1]Language features includedimplicit parallelism,Unicodesupport and concretesyntaxsimilar tomathematical notation.The language was not designed to be similar to Fortran. Syntactically, it most resemblesScala,Standard ML,andHaskell.Fortress was designed from the outset to have multiple syntactic stylesheets. Source code can be rendered asASCIItext, inUnicode,or as a prettied image. This would allow for support of mathematical symbols and other symbols in the rendered output for easier reading. Anemacs-based tool calledfortifytransforms ASCII-based Fortress source code intoLaTeXoutput.[2]

Fortress was also designed to be both highly parallel and have rich functionality contained within libraries, drawing from Java. For example, theforloop construct was a parallel operation, which would not necessarily iterate in a strictly linear manner, depending on the underlying implementation. However, theforconstruct was a library function and could be replaced by another version of the programmer's liking rather than being built into the language.

Fortress' designers made its syntax as close as possible topseudocodeand analyzed hundreds ofcomputer scienceandmathematicspapers, courses, books and journals using pseudocode to extract the common usage patterns of the English language and standard mathematical notation when used to representalgorithmsin pseudocode. Then they made the compiler trying to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between pseudocode and executable Fortress.[3][better source needed]

History

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Fortress was one of three languages created with funding from theHigh Productivity Computing Systemsproject; the others wereX10from IBM andChapelfromCray, Inc.In November 2006, when DARPA approved funding for the third phase of the HPCS project, X10 and Chapel were funded, but Fortress was not,[4]leading to uncertainty about the future of Fortress.

In January 2007, Fortress was released as open-source.[5] Version 1.0 of the Fortress Language Specification was released in April 2008, along with a compliant implementation targeting theJava Virtual Machine.

In July 2012, Steele announced that active development on Fortress would cease after a brief winding-down period, citing complications with using Fortress's type system on existing virtual machines.[6]

Example: Hello world!

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This is the Fortress version of the archetypalhello worldprogram, as presented in theFortress Reference Card:[2] 

component hello
export Executable
run() = println( “Hello, World!” )
end

Theexportstatement makes the programexecutableand every executable program in Fortress must implement therun()function. The file where the program is saved for compilation must have the same name as the one specified in the initialcomponentstatement. Theprintln()function is what outputs the "Hello, World!" words on the screen.

See also

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References

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  1. ^Eric Allen; David Chase; Joe Hallett; Victor Luchangco; Jan-Willem Maessen; Sukyoung Ryu; Guy L. Steele Jr.; Sam Tobin-Hochstadt; et al. (2008-03-31)."The Fortress Language Specification: Version 1.0"(PDF).research.sun.com.Sun Microsystems. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2013-01-20.
  2. ^ab"Project Fortress Reference Card"(PDF).Java.net.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2016-03-04.Retrieved2016-09-24.
  3. ^"pseudocode - Standards for pseudo code?".Stack Overflow. 2009-10-16.Retrieved2016-09-24.
  4. ^Josh Simons (November 22, 2006)."Sun Not Selected for HPCS Phase III: My Thoughts".The Navel of Narcissus.Archived fromthe originalon 2012-01-06 – via blogs.oracle.com.
  5. ^"What's Cool about Fortress".gbcacm.org.Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM. Archived fromthe originalon 2012-08-02.
  6. ^Gls-Oracle (2012-07-20)."Fortress Wrapping Up".Project Fortress.Archived fromthe originalon 2016-09-24 – via blogs.oracle.com.
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