[Fortress-interest] editing fortress code

[Victor Luchangco]

Darren Dale wrote:

>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. 
>  
>

If you have a non-ASCII editor, then you can produce the non-ASCII 
characters directly.  We imagine that eventually, we will have an IDE 
that will understand Fortress and give direct support for, among other 
things, entering non-ASCII characters using Fortress-style ASCII 
encodings, converting them on input, rather than on preprocessing.  But 
we don't have such an IDE yet.

>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?
>  
>

My version of emacs supports Unicode, and so I could produce the 
non-ASCII characters using it, but I just write the ASCII encodings 
anyway.  Also, we have an emacs tool that takes Fortress code, and 
implements much (but not all) of the rendering in LaTeX, which we intend 
to make available soon.

>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.
>  
>

Thanks.  We're excited too, and we look forward to getting (more) 
feedback about the language.

- Victor