[TYPES] Announcement: The Fortress Language Specification

[Sukyoung Ryu]

We'd like to announce availability of the first draft specification
of the Fortress programming language.  Fortress is a general-purpose,
statically checked, nominally typed, component-based programming
language designed for producing robust high-performance software with
high programmer productivity.

In many ways, Fortress is intended to be a "growable language",
i.e., a language that can be gracefully extended and applied in new
and unanticipated contexts.  For performance, Fortress supports
state-of-the-art compiler optimization techniques, scaling to
unprecedented levels of parallelism and of addressable memory.
For program reuse, Fortress has an extensible component system,
allowing separate program components to be independently developed,
deployed, and linked in a modular and robust fashion.  For
extensible syntax and semantics, Fortress supports modular and
extensible parsing, allowing new notations and static analyses
to be added to the language.

The name "Fortress" is derived from the intent to produce a "secure
Fortran", i.e., a language for high-performance computation that
provides abstraction and type safety on par with modern programming
language principles.  Despite this etymology, the language is a new
language with little relation to Fortran other than its intended
domain of application.  No attempt has been made to support backward
compatibility with existing versions of Fortran; indeed, many new
language features were invented during the design of Fortress.
The result is a language that employs cutting-edge features from
the programming-language research community to achieve an unprecedented
combination of performance and productivity.

For further information and downloads, please visit:

     http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/

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Programming Language Research Group,
Sun Microsystems Laboratories