Fortran Primer Tutorial
Have you heard of Fortran?
It is one of a group of scientific programming languages originating in the days before C and Pascal (The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (15 October 1956), the first Programmer’s Reference Manual for Fortran), but still used where numeric computation is paramount.
Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California[1] in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual 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 one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing [2] and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Fortran (the name is a blend derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with previous 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).
My early jobs in mapping, photogrammetry and surveying all had large components of Fortran with smaller amounts of BASIC. Fortran is still relevant for such numerical processing work, but it is less widely supported perhaps.
Before that my university studies used Fortran (FORTRAN back then) with punched cards … yes, I am THAT old … with all the inherent excitement of having one comma out of place and going back to the end of the queue to get back to the hopper. So for me, there has been no other language lasting so long in personal productive use as Fortran, and am sure there are quite a few baby boomers nodding likewise … or they might be nodding because it is bedtime … who knows?
Fortran, though, should not be cast with this “old” tag, because it has remained relevant, but it is just that “C and beyond” put it into the shade much more than its rivals Pascal and COBOL did, nor ALGOL 58, BASIC, PL/I, PACT I, MUMPS and Ratfor which were all seen as early influencers of Fortran’s design. It was a relief not having to use the GOTO statement so much, I must say. Here is a good link discussing its place in the programming language spectrum.
Link to Fortran information at … via Wikipedia where the quote above originated.
Link to Fortran enthusiasts site here.
Download programming source code and rename to Triangle_Herons.ftn.
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