


Unfortunately Fortran is often referred to as an ‘outdated’ or ‘legacy’ programming language. Fortran was developed in the early 1950s and the first ever Fortran program ran in 1954 - making Fortran fairly unusual among programming languages in that it predates the modern transistor computer - the first Fortran program ran on the IBM 704 vacuum tube computer! Fortran has outlived several nation states since its conception, and still is in wide use today in a number of specialised scientific communities. A brief Fortran historyįortran was originally named after the contraction of Formula Translation, highlighting Fortran’s origins as a language designed specifically for mathematical calculations.

This is where Fortran differs to interpreted languages such as Python and R which run through an interpreter which executes the instructions directly, but at the cost of compute speed.
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In other words, you must perform a special step called compilation of your written code before you are able to run it on a computer. Fortran programs can be highly optimised to run on high performance computers, and in general the language is suited to producing code where performance is important.įortran is a compiled language, or more specifically it is compiled ahead-of-time. While outwith the scientific community, Fortran has declined in popularity over the years, it still has a strong user base with scientific programmers, and is also used in organisations such as weather forecasters, financial trading, and in engineering simulations.
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