Fortran Versions
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Description: A brief history of Fortran versions 1 to Fortran 95.
A brief history of FORTRAN/Fortran 1-1 A Brief History of FORTRAN/Fortran *************************************** (Thanks to John Nebel for the nice description of a FORTRAN's user point of view) A note on names --------------- Both forms of the language name, FORTRAN and Fortran, are used. In this text, older versions (before and including 1977) of the language will be referred to as FORTRAN, post-1977 ones will be referred to as 'Fortran 90', 'Fortran 95' etc. The development of FORTRAN I ---------------------------- The first FORTRAN compiler was a milestone in the history of computing, at that time computers had very small memories (on the order of 15KB, it was common then to count memory capacities in bits), they were slow and had very primitive operating systems (if they had them at all). At those days it seemed that the only practical way is to program in assembly language. The pioneers of FORTRAN didn't invent the idea of writing programs in a High Level Language (HLL) and compiling the source code to object code with an optimizing compiler, but they produced the first successful HLL. They designed an HLL that is still widely used, and an optimizing compiler that produced very efficient code, in fact the FORTRAN I compiler held the record for optimizing code for 20 years! This wonderful first FORTRAN compiler was designed and written from scratch in 1954-57 by an IBM team lead by John W. Backus and staffed with super-programmers like Sheldon F. Best, Harlan Herrick, Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt, Robert Nelson, Irving Ziller, Richard Goldberg, Lois Haibt and David Sayre. By the way, Backus was also system co-designer of the computer that run the first compiler, the IBM 704. The new invention caught quickly, no wonder, programs computing nuclear power reactor parameters took now hours instead of weeks to write, and required much less programming skill. Another great advantage of the new invention was that programs now became portable. Fortran won the battle against Assembly languag
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| Page title: | A brief history of FORTRAN/Fortran |
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| Date | Creation Date: 2000-07-12T18:07:46Z Expiry Date: 2014-07-12T18:07:46Z |