[Fortress-interest] editing fortress code

[Darren Dale]

On Saturday 20 January 2007 6:48 pm, John Zedlewski wrote:
> Hi, now that a preview of fortress is available, maybe some of the
> developers could let us know what editors they use to write fortress
> code? Is there any environment that provides the unicode-style editing
> or math-displayed editing environments, as depicted in the fortress
> propaganda? Maybe a hacked up emacs x-symbol-mode?

I scanned through the fortress 1.0-alpha language specification yesterday, 
which discusses how to use legacy ASCII editors to write fortress programs, 
and how a preprocessing step converts these documents into the unicode-5.0 
fortress programs that are actually compiled. I didn't see a discussion 
concerning non-ASCII editors, only a passing reference to IDE's that will 
presumably include support for unicode-style programming with fortress in the 
future. 

Is it possible at this point in time to work directly with the unicode files, 
or is it the standard approach to generate them from ASCII? How was the 
rendered code in the language specification produced, is it the direct output 
from the ASCII conversion step, or was it rewritten in latex?

Aside from this point of confusion concerning rendering, I would like to say 
that I am really impressed with the design of fortress, at least from a 
birds-eye view. I'm excited about the possibilities, and can't wait to get 
started.

Darren Dale