[Fortress-interest] editing fortress code

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Jan 21, 2007, at 11:29 PM, Victor Luchangco wrote:

> 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.

I'd caution also that the present Fortress parser doesn't yet accept  
all the Unicode glyphs used by Fortress.  I have actually written  
Fortress code using the unicode glyphs in emacs, but I can't  
currently run this code through the Fortress interpreter.   
Ironically, the parser we threw away could handle these glyphs (but  
was deficient in more basic aspects of syntax!  Good tools go a long  
way, and Rats! has simplified parser maintainence quite a bit).  We  
are aware of the problem, and are working on a fix, but it may take a  
little while as there are bigger holes to fill at the moment.

-Jan-Willem Maessen