What is Fortran

Laptop

Fortran is a complied programming language famous for being the first high-level language made for human usage.

John Bakkus developed Fortran in 1957 at IBM, his motivation was to make something that was easier to implement and use as Assembly was the preferred language those days in the mainframe computer of OBM.

Fortran was a massive breakthrough in technology as it enabled those without access to computers could indirectly use a computer.

It was the first language that optimized the complier to produce machine code faster than that written by hand.

Early version of the language couldn't person fine-grained memory management but the modern versions are provided with pointers that enable us to allocate and de-allocate memory

The 'do-while' loop of Fortran was probably the most significant feature in the 50s.


Fortran has had several versions over the years, and currently the high-level language is even used in scientific and numeric computing.  Itis still a dominant language for the large scale simulation of physical systems like the astrophysical modeling of stars and galaxies, hydrodynamics etc.

The Fortran programming language remains quite popular in a number of scientific and engineering communities andcontinues to serve a mission-critical role in many NASA projects.

That is a lil bit about Fortran!