Day 1 Session 1: Fortress

Presenter: Christine Flood

Fortress is a next generation language that targets high-performance computing. It adds some very interesting features on top of an interesting mesh of Fortran and Java.

The presentation was structured in a Top 10 list style to help illustrate all the wonders of this new language.

Top 10 reasons to use Fortress

10. Contracts

• Requires
• Ensures
• Invariants

9. Dimensions and Units

8. Traits and Objects

• Multiple Inheritance!

7. Functional Methods

6. Parametric Polymorphism

5. Generators and reducers

4. Mathematical Syntax

3. Transactional Memory

2. Implicit Parallelism

1. Growable

While there were some interesting things in the presentation like Multiple Inheritance and Transactional Memory as well as native Mathematical Function representation, this was a glimpse of an evolving language idea that has quite a few merits for Fortran folks as well as mathematicians, but not a lot of practical use for a modern day java developer at this stage. This one is worth keeping an eye on for the future as it develops and matures. As interpretation becomes compilation and performance tweaks are made along the way, this one can go from cool to WOW! in short order.

Read lots more about Fortress as well as download an interpreter at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/

-mw