Sun Builds a Fortress for Scientists

Technical language aims to supplant Fortran

By Yvonne L. Lee

June 1, 2005 — MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — Sun Microsystems is working on a scientific programming language that its proponents say will do for Fortran what Java did for C.

The language, called Fortress, is still at least five years away, said Sun fellow and principal investigator for the programming languages research group Guy Steele Jr., who presented the language at Sun Labs Day here in April. Steele is known for his work developing the LISP and the Scheme languages.

Like Java, Fortress (research.sun.com/projects/plrg) would compile parts of the application into platform-independent bytecode before runtime while interpreting parts of the application at execution, said Steele in a separate interview.

“Traditionally, a compiler is operated completely before a program runs. With more recent strategies, including those in Java, you do a partial translation, and this translation takes many forms,” said Steele.

Fortress research is partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with the goal of creating economically viable technologies for both government and industrial applications from the end of the decade and beyond.

“One of the big improvements [of Java] beyond C was just catching stupid mistakes,” Steele said, explaining that such mistakes include alerting the programmer when an array request is out of the bounds of the array or deallocating storage prematurely, he said.

The language will assume parallel processing, and loops will be done in parallel by default rather than sequentially.

A key feature of the language is that it will seek to do as much as possible using libraries, a feature that Steele said will make the language “growable” and more agile.

“Wherever we’re tempted to add a feature to the language, we ask ourselves, ‘Could this feature be provided by a library instead?’” he said. This could spur communities of library writers for specific programming areas, he said.

Fortress also will attempt to make it possible to program equations in a more symbolic way than most current languages do. However, it also will be possible to write Fortress code linearly with the ASCII character set, he said.

“Have you ever wondered why an asterisk is used for multiplication?” he asked, and then explained that it was a convention used by accountants that carried over to adding machines and was used by early business computers.

Steele said he believed that making programs resemble equations would make mathematicians and scientists more productive.

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