FORTRAN Page - arranged by In-Young Ko
CSCI Dept.,
University of Southern California,
August 30, 1996
1. History and Philosophy of FORTRAN
There is a debate about who designed the first high-level programming
language, i.e. the first one to be compiled. FORTRAN is usually credited,
Knuth
and Pardo in 1977 credit Alick E. Glennie for his Autocode
compiler for the Manchester I computer in 1952. Backus gives credit to
Laning and Zierler at MIT who in 1953 built an algebraic translator for
the MIT Whirlwind computer.
At IBM in 1954, John Backus and a group started to design the FORmula
TRANslator System, or FORTRAN0. Computers were slow and
unreliable and all programming was done in machine or assembly code.
Work was completed in 1957 and the implemention supports what is
called FORTRAN I. The authors claimed that the resulting code would
be as efcient as handcrafted machine code. FORTRAN included many
features that were specific to the IBM 704, the first computer on which it
was implemented.
FORTRAN II followed in 1958. It included separate compilation of
subroutines. FORTRAN III was shortlived, and FORTRAN IV followed
in 1962. This remained the standard until the ANSI FORTRAN standard
was produced in 1977. The latest is
FORTRAN 90,
summarized in ANSI X3.198-1992.
For many years, FORTRAN dominated programming, and was described
as the lingua franca, or common tongue, for computer programmers.
2. Tutorials on FORTRAN
3. Reference Manuals on FORTRAN
4. FORTRAN Grammar
5. FORTRAN Compilers
6. Issues on FORTRAN
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