Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. It was the first commercially available programming language and was the first widely used high level general purpose programming language to have a functional implementation, as opposed to just a design on paper. It was first developed in 1954 but its first manual appeared in 1956 by a team led by John Backus at IBM.
The name Fortran stands for FORmula TRANslating system and was designed at IBM for scientific and engineering applications. The components were very simple, and provided the programmer with low-level access to the computers innards. At first it was treated with suspicison but over time it became popular because it provided a means of porting existing code to new computers, in a hardware market that was rapidly evolving; the language eventually became known for its efficiency.
Programs for the earliest computers consisted of
sequences of numerical codes. Each code represented a basic operation such as
‘fetch a number from memory location X and put it in register A’ or ‘add the
number in register A to the number in register B’. This style of programming
was time-consuming and error-prone. Mistakes were difficult to find. By 1950,
it had become possible to write programs using mnemonics such as ADD in
place of the numerical codes. An assembler converted the mnemonics into the
corresponding numerical codes. This made programming a little easier, but even
a simple program required dozens of operations, and it was still difficult to
track down mistakes.
The idea for Fortran was born out of the need to create a
programming language in which a series of calculations can be expressed in
something resembling mathematical notation. A translation program (a compiler)
would then convert it into the numerical codes which the computer understood.
By 1956, the team published a manual which described
the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System, or FORTRAN for
short.
Today, this language would
be considered restrictive as it only included IF, DO, and GOTO statements, but
at the time, these commands were a big step forward. Fortran’s design was the basis for many other
programming languages. Fortran encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which
evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility
with prior versions. Successive versions have added support for structured
programming and processing of character-based data (FORTRAN
77), array programming, modular programming and generic
programming (Fortran 90), high performance Fortran (Fortran
95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003) and concurrent
programming (Fortran 2008).
FORTRAN’s growing popularity led many
computer manufacturers to implement versions of it for their own machines. Each
manufacturer added its own customizations, making it impossible to guarantee
that a program written for one type of machine would compile and run on a
different type. Today, Fortran
is still a popular language
for high-performance computing and is used for programs that
benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers. It is also in continuous use
for over six decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical
weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid
dynamics, computational
physics, crystallography and computational chemistry.
SOURCE:
cs.brown
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