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In this Fortran Tutorial we will discuss Fortran programming Language. Fortran was originally developed by a team at IBM in 1957 for scientific calculations. Later developments made it into a high level programming language. In this tutorial, we will learn the basic concepts of Fortran and its programming code.

Audience

This tutorial is designed for the readers who wish to learn the basics of Fortran.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is designed for beginners. A general awareness of computer programming languages is the only prerequisite to make the most of this tutorial.

Overview

Fortran, as derived from Formula Translating System, is a general-purpose, imperative programming language. It is used for numeric and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. Fortran ruled this programming area for a long time and became very popular for high performance computing, because.

It supports −

• Numerical analysis and scientific computation
• Structured programming
• Array programming
• Modular programming
• Generic programming
• High performance computing on supercomputers
• Object oriented programming
• Concurrent programming
• Reasonable degree of portability between computer systems

Facts about Fortran

• Fortran was created by a team, led by John Backus at IBM in 1957.
• Initially the name used to be written in all capital, but current standards and implementations only require the first letter to be capital.
• Fortran stands for FORmula TRANslator.
• Originally developed for scientific calculations, it had very limited support for character strings and other structures needed for general purpose programming.
• Later extensions and developments made it into a high level programming language with good degree of portability.
• Original versions, Fortran I, II and III are considered obsolete now.
• Oldest version still in use is Fortran IV, and Fortran 66.
• Most commonly used versions today are : Fortran 77, Fortran 90, and Fortran 95.
• Fortran 77 added strings as a distinct type.
• Fortran 90 added various sorts of threading, and direct array processing.

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