What is fortran?

What is FORTRAN?

Fortran is a general purpose programming language, mainly intended for mathematical computations such as in engineering. Fortran is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, and was originally capitalized as FORTRAN. Fortran was the first ever high-level programming language. The work on Fortran started in the 1950's at IBM and there have been many versions since. By convention, each Fortran version is denoted by the last two digits of the year the standard was proposed. Thus we have

Fortran 66
Fortran 77
Fortran 90 (95)

There are several versions of Fortran aimed at parallel computers. The most important one is High Performance Fortran (HPF), which is a de-facto standard.

Users should be aware that most Fortran 77 compilers allow a superset of Fortran 77, for example they allow non-standard extensions.

AG00282_.GIF (2198 bytes)

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PIE Software Inc. 09/07/2001