[ The Types Forum (announcements only), http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-announce ]
We'd like to announce availability of a preliminary, open source, interpreter implementing a small core of the Fortress programming language. This interpreter runs on the JVM. You can download the source code at: http://fortress.sunsource.net/ Our intention is to grow this implementation over time, with the help of university partners and other interested third parties. We expect that many parts of this interpreter will be used as components of a complete Fortress compiler, which is our long term goal. Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. In order to explore breakaway approaches to improving programmability, the Fortress design has not been tied to legacy language syntax or semantics; all aspects of HPC language design have been rethought from the ground up. As a result, we are able to support features in Fortress such as transactions, specification of locality, and implicit parallel computation, as integral features built into the core of the language. Features such as the Fortress component system and test framework facilitate program assembly and testing, and enable powerful compiler optimizations across library boundaries. Even the syntax and type system of Fortress are custom-tailored to modern HPC programming, supporting mathematical notation and static checking of properties such as physical units and dimensions, static type checking of multidimensional arrays and matrices, and definitions of domain-specific language syntax in libraries. Moreover, Fortress has been designed with the intent that it be a "growable" language, gracefully supporting the addition of future language features. In fact, much of the Fortress language itself (even the definition of arrays and other basic types) is encoded in libraries atop a relatively small core language. For further information and downloads, please visit: http://fortress.sunsource.net/ Comments and feedback are welcome. ====================================================================== Programming Language Research Group, Sun Microsystems Laboratories