/dev/code

There has been some discussion on Lambda the Ultimate about a new language that Guy Steele (of Scheme fame, among other things) has been working on at Sun Labs. It is called Fortress and is targeted towards the same application domain as Fortran. This is *not* Fortran, however. Take a look at this list of features (shamelessly cut&pasted from LtU):

an advanced component and linking architecture

objects and traits (which look similar to Moby and Scala)

multiple dispatch

type inference

parameterized types

extensible syntax

first-class functions

proper tail calls

labelled jumps, exceptions

contracts

some interesting parallelism features (including futures, parallel loops, atomicity primitives, transactions)

matrices

comprehensions

bignums, fixnums (signed and unsigned), floating-point, imaginary and complex numbers

dimensions

It is nice to see type inference popping up again, as well as proper tail calls, parameterized types and contracts (kinda sounds like Nice except for the tail calls). I have only glanced at the spec but one of the interesting things that popped out is that do-loops are assumed to execute in parallel by default. It will be interesting to see what happens with this language.