The language was widely adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs, which encouraged compiler writers to produce compilers that could generate faster and more efficient code. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.' John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, 'Much of my work has come from being lazy. While the community was skeptical that this new method could possibly outperform hand-coding, it reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20, and quickly gained acceptance. : 75 This was the first optimizing compiler, because customers were reluctant to use a high-level programming language unless its compiler could generate code with performance approaching that of hand-coded assembly language. : 71 The first manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956, : 72 with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (October 15, 1956), the first programmer's reference manual for Fortran Ī draft specification for The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by November 1954. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers. It has been in use for over six decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry.

Absoft, Cray, GFortran, G95, IBM XL Fortran, Intel, Hitachi, Lahey/Fujitsu, Numerical Algorithms Group, Open Watcom, PathScale, PGI, Silverfrost, Oracle Solaris Studio, othersĪLGOL 58, BASIC, C, Chapel, CMS-2, DOPE, Fortress, PL/I, PACT I, MUMPS, IDL, Ratforįortran ( / ˈ f ɔːr t r æ n/ formerly FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.įortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing.

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