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 language, the first in a series of battles to come,

and was adopted by the scientific and military communities and used

extensively in the Space Program and military projects.

The phenomenal success of the FORTRAN I team, can be attributed in part

to the friendly non-authoritative group climate. Another factor may be

that IBM management had the sense to shelter and protect the group,

even though the project took much more time than was first anticipated.

FORTRAN II, III, IV and FORTRAN 66

----------------------------------

FORTRAN II (1958) was a significant improvement, it added the capability

for separate compilation of program modules, assembly language modules

could also be 'linked loaded' with FORTRAN modules.

FORTRAN III (1958) was never released to the public. It made possible

using assembly language code right in the middle of the FORTRAN code.

Such "inlined" assembly code can be more efficient, but the advantages

of an HLL are lost (e.g. portability, ease of use).

FORTRAN IV (1961) was a 'clean up' of FORTRAN II, improving things

like the implementation of the COMMON and EQUIVALENCE statements,

and eliminating some machine-dependant language irregularities.

A FORTRAN II to FORTRAN IV translator was used to retain backward

compatibility with earlier FORTRAN programs.

On May 1962 another milestone was traversed, an ASA committee started

developing a standard for the FORTRAN language, a very important step

that made it worthwhile for vendors to produce FORTRAN systems for

every new computer, and made FORTRAN an even more popular HLL.

The new ASA standard was published in 1966, and was known accordingly

as FORTRAN 66, it was the first HLL standard in the world.

FORTRAN 77 standard

-------------------

Formally outdated many years ago, compilers for FORTRAN 77 are still

used today, mainly to re-compile legacy code.

FORTRAN 77 added:

o DO loops with a decreasing control variable (index).

o Block if statements IF ... THEN ... ELSE ... ENDIF.

Before F77 there were only IF GOTO statements.

o Pre-test of DO loops. Before F77 DO loops were always

executed at least once, so you had to add an IF GOTO

before the loop if you wanted the expected behaviour.

o CHARACTER data type. Before F77 characters were always

stored inside INTEGER variables.

o Apostrophe delimited character string constants.

o Main program termination without a STOP statement.

The next Fortran standard (fortran 90) was published too many years

after Fortran 77 was out, allowing other programming languages to

evolve and compete with Fortran. For example, the system-programming

language C, and its evolved variant C++, became more popular in the

traditional strongholds of Fortran: the scientific and engineering

worlds, in spite of being non-computationally oriented.

The delay in publishing a new standard can be attributed in part

to political reasons as testified by Brian Meek in:

The Fortran Saga

Fortran 90 standard

-------------------

A new standard has been designed and widely implemented in recent years.

It is unofficially called Fortran 90, and adds many powerful extensions

to FORTRAN 77. The language in its present form is competitive with

computer languages created later (e.g. C).

Fortran 90 added:

o Free format source code form (column independent)

o Modern control structures (CASE & DO WHILE)

 o Records/structures - called "Derived Data Types"

o Powerful array notation (array sections, array operators, etc.)

o Dynamic memory allocation

o Operator overloading

o Keyword argument passing

o The INTENT (in, out, inout) procedure argument attribute

o Control of numeric precision and range

o Modules - packages containing variable and code

Fortran 95 standard

-------------------

Fortran 95 added some minor improvements to the Fortran 90 standard.

Fortran from a user point of view

---------------------------------

... yes, it was FORTRAN on the IBM 7094. [I] Have written volumes

of Fortran code and have suffered through "it ought to be written

in assembly language", "it ought to be written in PL/1", "it ought

to be written in COBOL", "it ought to be written in Pascal", "it

ought to be written in C", etc. depending on what generation of

programmers was doing the criticizing.

A few years ago, in the COBOL era, one of the users resorted to
replying to questioners by showing them some function they liked

and asking "you tell me, what language was that written in?"

... It was good to see someone else cognizant of the language's

obvious merits.

Bibliography on FORTRAN history

-------------------------------

Annals of History of Computing, 6, 1, January, 1984 (whole issue).

Programming Systems and Languages (S. Rosen ed.), McGraw Hill,

1967, pp 29-47 (this is Backus's original paper).

History of Programming Languages (R.L. Wexelblat ed.),

Academic Press, 1981, pp 25-74.

A summary appears in vol. 5 of the Encyclopedia of Science

and Technology, Academic Press, 1986, under 'Fortran'.

and in Chapter 1 of Fortran 90 Explained (Oxford, 1990).

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| FORTRAN IS THE COMPUTING LANGUAGE OF CHOICE |

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A brief history of FORTRAN/Fortran - Ibiblio

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History

One of the oldest programming languages, the FORTRAN was developed by a team of programmers at
IBM led by John Backus, and was first published in 1957. The name FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula
TRANslation, because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code.

Often referred to as a scientific language, FORTRAN was the first high-level language, using the first
compiler ever developed. Prior to the development of FORTRAN computer programmers were required
to program in machine/assembly code, which was an extremely difficult and time consuming task, not to
mention the dreadful chore of debugging the code. The objective during it's design was to create a
programming language that would be: simple to learn, suitable for a wide variety of applications,
machine independent, and would allow complex mathematical expressions to be stated similarly to
regular algebraic notation. While still being almost as efficient in execution as assembly language. Since
FORTRAN was so much easier to code, programmers were able to write programs 500% faster than
before, while execution efficiency was only reduced by 20%, this allowed them to focus more on the
problem solving aspects of a problem, and less on coding.

FORTRAN was so innovative not only because it was the first high-level language, but also because of it's
compiler, which is credited as giving rise to the branch of computer science now known as compiler
theory. Several years after it's release FORTRAN had developed many different dialects, (due to special
tweaking by programmers trying to make it better suit their personal needs) making it very difficult to
transfer programs from one machine to another.

These problems lead the American Standards Association (now known as the American National
Standards Association) to release it's first Standard for a Programming Language 1966. This first
standardized version has come to be known as FORTRAN '66 (aka.. FORTRAN IV).
Despite this standardization, a few years later, various new dialects began to surface again, requiring the
Standards Association review the language again. This version is known as FORTRAN '77. This version
was released in 1978 (it was called '77 because the Association began it's review in 1977), with several
new features. Some of the more notable properties were; new error handling methods, and
mechanisms for managing large-scale programs. The latest version; Fortran '90 (released in 1990, using
the new capitalization scheme) added even more new features, such as support for: recursion, pointers,
and for programmer-defined data types. {Fortran 90's future - Current research in compiler theory
involves equipping compilers to generate object code, that is able to exploit the capabilities of massively
parallel computers. The Fortran 90 compilers are key targets of such research}

Reference

University of Michigan-Dearborn

Computer and Information Science

http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/fortran/fortran.html

Computational Physics