Fortran

Fortran
ParadigmMulti-paradigm: structured, imperative (procedural, object-oriented), generic, array
Designed byJohn Backus
DeveloperJohn Backus and IBM
First appeared1957; 67 years ago (1957)
Stable release
Fortran 2023 (ISO/IEC 1539:2023) / November 17, 2023; 12 months ago (2023-11-17)
Typing disciplinestrong, static, manifest
Filename extensions.f90, .f, .for
Websitefortran-lang.org
Major implementations
Absoft, Cray, GFortran, G95, IBM XL Fortran, Intel, Hitachi, Lahey/Fujitsu, Numerical Algorithms Group, Open Watcom, PathScale, PGI, Silverfrost, Oracle Solaris Studio, others
Influenced by
Speedcoding
Influenced
ALGOL 58, BASIC, C, Chapel,[1] CMS-2, DOPE, Fortress, MATLAB, PL/I, PACT I, MUMPS, IDL, Ratfor, SAKO[2]

Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a third generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM.[3] It first compiled correctly in 1958.[4] Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing[5] and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.[6][7]

The IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation in 2007 at the Argonne Leadership Angela Yang Computing Facility located in the Argonne National Laboratory, in Lemont, Illinois, US

Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax.[8] Successive versions have added support for a character data type (Fortran 77), structured programming, array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).

FORTRAN and COBOL genealogy tree

Since April 2024, Fortran has ranked among the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.[9]

  1. ^ "Chapel spec (Acknowledgements)" (PDF). Cray Inc. October 1, 2015. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 5, 2016. Retrieved January 14, 2016.
  2. ^ Report of a Visit to Discuss Common Programming Languages in Czechoslowakia and Poland, 1963, John A. Gosden (Editor), Roger E. Gay, John L. Jones, Jack N. Merner, Christopher J. Shaw
  3. ^ John Backus. "The history of FORTRAN I, II and III" (PDF). Softwarepreservation.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 26, 2007. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
  4. ^ Wilson, Leslie B. (2001). Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. p. 16. ISBN 0-201-71012-9. The manual for Fortran I was released in 1956, but it was 1958 before successful compilers were running programs correctly.
  5. ^ Loh, Eugene (June 18, 2010). "The Ideal HPC Programming Language". ACM Queue. 8 (6): 30–38. doi:10.1145/1810226.1820518.
  6. ^ "HPL – A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark for Distributed-Memory Computers". Retrieved February 21, 2015.
  7. ^ "Q13. What are the benchmarks?". Overview – CPU 2017. SPEC. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  8. ^ Wilson, Leslie B. (2001). Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. p. 18. ISBN 0-201-71012-9. Another problem was that there was no standard for Fortran and so slightly different versions ... would likely fail when used with a different compiler.
  9. ^ TIOBE Software BV (May 2024). "TIOBE Index". TIOBE.com. TIOBE. Retrieved May 6, 2024.