FORTRAN

Early and highly influential programming language designed by IBM in the 1950s, by now primarily used in numerical and scientific computing but on top of the usual inertia and the wide availability of libraries. FORTRAN can produce numerical code that is significantly faster that what you can expect from languages like C and Pascal and I/O speed, especially registered I/O is in a whole different league to CPL class languages like C and C++.

While Fortran was a major influence on the European Algol languages in the late 1950s, things have essentially turned around 180 degrees with all FORTRAN standards since the early 70s being heavily influenced by structured Algol derivatives like Pascal and Modula-2.

Classic FORTRAN is always spelled all caps, Fortran 90 and later however are expected to be formatted as other nouns. We tend to use the older conventions here since only a couple of Fortran 90 OS/2 implementations showed up and they did not sell well so the bulk of OS/2 programming has traditionally been done in FORTRAN-77.

History
Developed primarily by John Backus then working from the IBM headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City, USA and formally introduced as an optional software for the IBM 704 computer in April 1957 even though IBM had shipped versions in 1956. The basic idea behind FORTRAN was for it to resemble common algebra notation as much as possible.


 * 1958: FORTRAN II
 * 1962: FORTRAN IV
 * 1967: FORTRAN 66 (ANS X3.9-1966)
 * 1967: Basic FORTRAN (ANS X3.10-1966)
 * 1978: FORTRAN-77:X3.9-1978
 * 1991: Fortran 90:ISO/IEC 1539:1991
 * 1997: Fortran 95:ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997
 * 2004: Fortran 2003:ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004
 * 2008: Fortran 2008:ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010
 * Draft Fortran2008 - Minor revision of 2003


 * Standards bodies
 * Fortran Standards Committee homepage - The home of FORTRAN standardisation since 1966, although usually credited to ANSI the standard is actually developed by "National Committee for Information Technology Standards" (NCITS) nowadays known as "InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards " (INCITS), despite having no presence outside the USA.

Source code snippets, archives and collections
Small programs or routines that you can integrate into your own programs or study to learn from, but are not delivered in library form.
 * Harold Zbiegien's date algorithms

Publications

 * John Backus, et al: FORTRAN Automated Coding System For the IBM 704 EDPM - 1956

Links

 * USENET: [news:comp.lang.fortran comp.lang.fortran] - Surprisingly popular