

Early IBM computers did not support lower case letters and the names of versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were usually spelled in all-uppercase (FORTRAN 77 was the last version in which the Fortran character set included only uppercase letters ). : p.2 Other sources suggest the name stands for Formula Translator, or Formula Translation.

#Simply fortran tutorial manual
The first manual for FORTRAN describes it as a Formula Translating System and printed the name with small caps, F ORTRAN.

The IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation in 2007 at the Argonne Leadership Angela Yang Computing Facility located in the Argonne National Laboratory, in Lemont, Illinois, USA.įortran has had numerous versions, each of which has added extensions while largely retaining compatibility with preceding versions. 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.
