[TYPES/announce] Announcement: A reference implementation of Fortress

[Sukyoung Ryu]

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.
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Programming Language Research Group,
Sun Microsystems Laboratories