Re: [Axiom-developer] APL, J, and Axiom documentation

[Ted Kosan]

Tim wrote:

>I'm not sure what ability Fortress will have to handle Axiom-style
>types. They aren't required for Fortran and Steele seems to have taken
>Fortran as the target replacement language. I'm also not sure if it
>can handle the category/domain questions.

My understanding is that Fortress was designed to support any
application that could benefit from mathematical notation.  One of
their design goals appears to be extreme flexibility and they achieved
this by having most of the language specified by libraries.

The talk I obtained the slides from was very illuminating and it
contains the best explanation of Fortress I have been able to find:

    http://www.infoq.com/presentations/fortress-steele

My thought is that an Axiom developer would be able to determine
whether or not Fortress can handle Axiom-style types by viewing this
talk.

Another thing that comes across fairly clearly in the talk is that Sun
is planning to use Fortress as a way to create a large scientific
computing community just like Java was used to create a large "web
commerce" community.  The marketing person in me can't help but think
that Axiom's algorithms would be very useful for helping to achieve
this goal.

Ted