The programming language Fortran celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In 1957 IBMer John Backus and his team released their Fortran compiler, IBM model 704. The goal of this development was to reduce the cost of programming scientific applications by providing an ‘automatic programming system’ to replace assembly language with a notation closer to the scientific programming domain.

Fortran came to dominate the area of numeric computation and scientific programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, and computational chemistry. Fortran encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while retaining compatibility with previous versions.

Read More at GizMag.

Tags:No Tags