Successive versions have added support for structured programmingĪnd processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, modular programming and generic programming (Fortran 90), high performance Fortran (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), concurrent programming (Fortran 2008), and native parallel computing capabilities (Coarray Fortran 2008/2018).įortran's design was the basis for many other programming languages. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.įortran has had numerous versions, each of which has added extensions whilst largely retaining compatibility with preceding versions.
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.
The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (15 October 1956), the first programmer's reference manual for Fortranįortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing.
