Fortran

Fortran (derived from “Formula Translation”) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics 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.

It is one of the older active programming languages, and it evolved adding extensions and retaining back-compatibility with prior versions. One the the most popular versions was FORTRAN77 (from 1977, and the most used for didactic application, or at least I learned with this version). FORTRAN77 have structured programming and processing of character-based data. In FORTRAN90 was added array programming, modular programming and generic programming, in FORTRAN95 was added high-performance programming, in FORTRAN2003 object-oriented programming and finally in FORTRAN2008 concurrent programming.

Fortran even keeps its initial form inherited from punched cards in which the first 6 columns was kept for special instructions and the code did not go far away of the 80 column. Even today is only directly used by universities, research and high-performance institutes, most of the high-performance and numberical libraries that other languages uses are coded in Fortran as LAPACK (for numerical linear algebra) or IMSL and NAG.

When do you have to use Fortran:

• Flexible numerical high-performance needs. (Yes, I do not recommend other cases)

See also

Python, Julia, SAS, Matlab, Go (Programming language), Java, R, C, Sage

Material

• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran
• Manual Fortran 90/95 UPC

Books

• Ellis, T.M.R. (1994). FORTRAN 90 Programming. Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Chapman, Stephen J. (2003) Fortran 90/95 For Scientists And Engineers. McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math
• Chapman, Stephen J. (2007) Fortran 95/2003 for Scientists and Engineers. McGraw-Hill Higher Education
• Kernighan, Brian W.; Plauger, P.J. (1988). The Elements of Programming Style. 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill Companies
• Fatica, Massimiliano; Ruetsch, Gregory. (2013). Cuda FORTRAN for Scientists and Engineers. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.