Fortran
(previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, 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 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 and is the
language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.
Fortran (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 processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming,
modular programming and object-oriented programming (Fortran 90 / 95), and
object-oriented and generic programming (Fortran 2003).(www.thejinnni.com)
The names of earlier
versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were conventionally spelled in
all-caps (FORTRAN 77 was the version in which the use of lowercase letters in
keywords was strictly nonstandard). The capitalization has been dropped in
referring to newer versions beginning with Fortran 90. The official language
standards now refer to the language as "Fortran". Because the
capitalization was never completely consistent in actual usage, this article
adopts the convention of using the all-caps FORTRAN in referring to versions of
FORTRAN through FORTRAN 77 and the title-caps Fortran in referring to versions
of Fortran from Fortran 90 onward. This convention is reflected in the
capitalization of FORTRAN in the ANSI X3.9-1966 (FORTRAN 66) and ANSI X3.9-1978
(FORTRAN 77) standards and the title caps Fortran in the ANSI X3.198-1992
(Fortran 90), ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 (Fortran 95) and ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004 (Fortran
2003) standards.
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