Fortran - Overview

Fortran, as derived from Formula Translating System, is a general-purpose, imperative programming language. It is used for numeric and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering apppcations. Fortran ruled this programming area for a long time and became very popular for high performance computing, because.

It supports −

Numerical analysis and scientific computation

Structured programming

Array programming

Modular programming

Generic programming

High performance computing on supercomputers

Object oriented programming

Concurrent programming

Reasonable degree of portabipty between computer systems

Facts about Fortran

Fortran was created by a team, led by John Backus at IBM in 1957.

Initially the name used to be written in all capital, but current standards and implementations only require the first letter to be capital.

Fortran stands for FORmula TRANslator.

Originally developed for scientific calculations, it had very pmited support for character strings and other structures needed for general purpose programming.

Later extensions and developments made it into a high level programming language with good degree of portabipty.

Original versions, Fortran I, II and III are considered obsolete now.

Oldest version still in use is Fortran IV, and Fortran 66.

Most commonly used versions today are : Fortran 77, Fortran 90, and Fortran 95.

Fortran 77 added strings as a distinct type.

Fortran 90 added various sorts of threading, and direct array processing.