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Forscape – A Language and Editor for Scientific Computation

(github.com)
105 points faresahmed | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 10:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.303s | source
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zokier ◴[15 Oct 24 19:34 UTC] No.41852280[source]▶
Code typography is such a neglected area, I'm glad to see any projects that touch on that. This reminds me of Suns Fortress language, which was designed also for scientific computing (afaik more in HPC sense), and also allowed rendering code into pdf with improved typography. Unfortunately lot of the original Fortress resources have linkrotted away, but there are some examples in this presentation (by Guy Steele!) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150FP/archive/neal-glew/mcrt/F...
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1. versteegen ◴[16 Oct 24 12:17 UTC] No.41858214[source]▶
Agreed, I've wondered why it's so ignored since I first learnt to program, and relatedly, why are programming languages strictly English-based?

Those slides are my introduction to Fortress. Sounds nice, sorry to hear it's discontinued. I'm struck by how very similar to Julia it is (which is officially inspired by Fortress), for example the focus on performance and maths, zero-cost abstractions, type specialisation, very similar syntax, ASCII<->Unicode equivalence, encouragement of unicode identifiers and operators, and some (small) amount of eliding '*' for multiplication. (You can write "2(a + 1)a^2" but not "(a+1)(a+2)" because the latter is a function call. Whitespace between multiplicands not allowed.)

It seems it would be easy to write a package to display Julia code as HTML or Latex, although I didn't find one. There's already a library to print expressions as Latex, and of course in a Jupyter notebook results are displayed in HTML.