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Fortran - Wikipedia

Fortran

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Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language designed for numeric computation and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM with a reference manual being released in 1956;1 however, the first compilers only began to produce accurate code two years later.2 Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing3 and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.45

Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. The two most important early versions were FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV.6 In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax.7 Successive versions have added support for a character data type, structured programming (Fortran 77), array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).

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Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. John Backus. “The history of FORTRAN I, II and III” (PDF). softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 26, 2007. Retrieved February 8, 2026. ↩

  2. Wilson, Leslie B. (2001). Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. p. 16. ISBN 0-201-71012-9. The manual for Fortran I was released in 1956, but it was 1958 before successful compilers were running programs correctly. ↩

  3. Loh, Eugene (June 18, 2010). “The Ideal HPC Programming Language”. ACM Queue. 8 (6): 30–38. doi:10.1145/1810226.1820518. ↩

  4. “HPL – A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark for Distributed-Memory Computers”. Retrieved February 21, 2015. ↩

  5. “Q13. What are the benchmarks?”. Overview – CPU 2017. SPEC. Retrieved November 13, 2019. ↩

  6. Pratt, Terrence W. (1975). Programming Languages: Design and Implementation. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. pp. 314–315, 325–326. ISBN 0-13-730432-3. ↩

  7. Wilson, Leslie B. (2001). Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. p. 18. ISBN 0-201-71012-9. Another problem was that there was no standard for Fortran and so slightly different versions… would likely fail when used with a different compiler. ↩

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