fortan

Fortan is commonly a misspelling of Fortran, a high-level programming language designed for numeric and scientific computing. Fortran, short for Formula Translation, was developed in the 1950s by IBM led by John Backus and released in 1957. It was among the earliest high-level languages and the first to significantly optimize the translation of mathematical formulas into executable code, contributing to the growth of scientific computing.

Over the decades, Fortran evolved through multiple standards. Each major revision introduced features such as procedures and modules, improved input/output, better numerical precision, and support for structured and later object-oriented programming. Modern Fortran emphasizes array-based computing, modular programming via modules and interfaces, portable code across architectures, and interoperability with C via ISO_C_BINDING. It has built-in support for parallelism, including coarrays and parallel constructs used with OpenMP and MPI.

Today, Fortran remains widely used in high-performance computing areas such as physics, climate modeling, computational chemistry, and engineering simulations. It hosts a large ecosystem of compilers (such as gfortran and Intel Fortran) and numerical libraries, and it continues to be taught in educational settings and maintained in long-lived scientific code bases due to its performance and numerical reliability.