The Fortran Programming Language

Written September 5, 2013

One of the oldest programming languages, the Fortran programming language known mainly for its strength in numeric and scientific computation, was developed in the 1950′s and first published in 1957 by IBM in San Jose California as the first known high level programming language. Fortran came about at a time where programmers only had the opportunity to create programs using assembly and machine code which came with several downfalls such as it was:

now with the rise of Fortran, programers were able to write code at a much faster rate giving the programmer a lot more time to focus on solving problems than on the code being written. It was a true innovation in its day, being credited with the creation of the branch of computer science known today as the compiler theory.
Over the years Fortran has seen significant changes to its dialect after programmers over time saw the need to modify it to better suite their needs, which led to the American Association releasing its first standard of a Programming Language in 1966 which came to being known as the FORTRAN 66.

Significant Language Features

Sample Hello world code written in fortran

program hello  
print *, "Hello World!"  
end program hello  

sources:

Comments

comments powered by Disqus