Oldest version still in use is Fortran IV, and Fortran 66. Original versions, Fortran I, II and III are considered obsolete now. Later extensions and developments made it into a high level programming language with good degree of portability. Originally developed for scientific calculations, it had very limited support for character strings and other structures needed for general purpose programming. Initially the name used to be written in all capital, but current standards and implementations only require the first letter to be capital.
Fortran ruled this programming area for a long time and became very popular for high performance computing, because. It is used for numeric and scientific computing.įortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. Fortran, as derived from Formula Translating System, is a general-purpose, imperative programming language.
