Fortran
general-purpose programming language
Fortran (; formerly FORTRAN) is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language designed for numeric computation and scientific computing.
Fortran was originally developed by IBM with a reference manual being released in 1956; however, the first compilers only began to produce accurate code two years later. 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 and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.
Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. The two most important early versions were FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax. Successive versions have added support for a character data type, structured programming (Fortran 77), array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).
Naming
The first manual for FORTRAN describes it as a Formula Translating System, and printed the name with small caps, Fortran. Other sources suggest the name stands for Formula Translator, or, most commonly, Formula Translation.
Early IBM computers did not support lowercase letters, and the names of versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were usually spelled in all-uppercase.
The public source identifies “Fortran” as general-purpose programming language. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Fortran, general-purpose and programming.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fortran” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.