What is Fortran written in?
What Fortran is used for
Fortran remains the language of high-performance numerical and scientific computing, weather prediction, computational physics, and engineering simulations, where decades of optimized math libraries still run.
Notable software: climate and weather models, and core linear-algebra libraries (BLAS, LAPACK) that underpin much of modern scientific computing.
Quick Facts
- Designed by
- John Backus
- Developer
- IBM
- First released
- 1957
- Typing
- static
- Filename extension
- .f, .for, .f90
- Website
- fortran-lang.org
About Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose programming language. It is a statically typed language that compiles ahead of time to native machine code. It supports imperative and procedural programming.
Fortran first appeared in 1957 and was designed by John Backus. Development is led by IBM.
How Fortran is implemented
In the Language Lineage dataset, Fortran is self-hosting, so its own compiler is written in Fortran itself. Reaching self-hosting, where a language is mature enough to compile itself, is a milestone that proves the language can handle a large, real-world program.
Fortran in the language family tree
Fortran drew on ideas from Speedcoding and went on to influence Julia, COBOL, C, MATLAB, PL/I, and Fortran 95.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata · Official site
Frequently Asked Questions
Evidence Sources
- https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html
- https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran_95
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_(programming_language)
- Fortran on Wikidata (Q83303)