The Fortress Language Specification - CiteSeerX

default distributions will provide programmers with good performance over a variety of machines. However, in some
circumstances, performance can be improved by overriding the default selection of distributions. Moreover, some
programmers might wish to define these distributions, tailored for particular platforms and programs.
2.16.3 Operator Overloading
Operators in Fortress can be overloaded with new definitions. Here is an alternative definition of the factorial function,
defined as a postfix operator:
opr (n)! = ∏
i←1:n
i
As with mathematical notation, Fortress allows operators to be defined as prefix, postfix, and infix. More exotic
operators can even be defined as subscripting (i.e., applications of the operators look like subscripts), and as bracketing
(i.e., applications of the operators look like the operands have been simply enclosed in brackets).
2.16.4 Definition of New Syntax
Fortress provides a facility for the definition of new syntax in libraries. This facility is useful for defining libraries for
domain-specific languages, such as SQL, XML, etc. It is also used to encode some of the language constructs seen by
applications programmers.
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