Fortran

Fortran, short for Formula Translation, is a high-level programming language designed for numeric computation and scientific computing. It was developed in the 1950s at IBM under John Backus and released in 1957 as the first widely used high-level language for technical computing. Fortran has since evolved through many revisions, with attention to numerical accuracy, array processing, and parallelism, while maintaining a long-standing presence in scientific code bases.

Early versions used fixed-form source code and simple control structures. Fortran 77 standardized formatting and introduced structured programming constructs. The major modernization began with Fortran 90, which added free-form source, array operations, modules, recursion, and modern data types. Subsequent revisions—Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, and Fortran 2008—brought object-oriented programming, interoperability with C, submodules, and native support for parallel programming via coarrays. The latest widely adopted standard is Fortran 2018, with work continuing on newer revisions.

Fortran remains dominant in high-performance computing, weather and climate models, physics simulations, computational chemistry, and finance, thanks to mature compilers and strong numerical performance on large arrays. Popular compilers include gfortran (GNU), Intel Fortran, IBM XL Fortran, and NAG Fortran. The language emphasizes explicit typing, array syntax, and predictable performance, and it offers features such as derived types, modules, and ISO standard interoperability with C and other languages.