FORTRAN is still going strong

This venerable programming language turns 52 on Sunday

The weary cliche 'old is gold' doesn't find much truck with IT industry people, who believe that anything that is in production is already obsolete because something newer is already making its way from the drawing board to the factory. But even this industry needs to once in a while respect its own history. And one integral part of this history is the language FORTRAN, which expands to 'Formula Translator'.

Why is FORTRAN important? One reason could be because of its continuing importance in this world of speed. As Wikipidia says, FORTRAN is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and programs to benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers are written in FORTRAN.

Let's assemble

While we may today hold FORTRAN as a quaint reminder of our past replete with punch cards and mainframes the language was revolutionary when it was released. This was because, before the launch of FORTRAN, there was only one way in which a program could be written in assembly. And this was extremely cumbersome, to say the least.

But with the introduction of FORTRAN, things changed. Programmers could stop worrying about how to make the machine understand them and instead work on writing programmes that could be easily understood both by themselves and other programmers.

Some history

The initial release of FORTRAN for the IBM 704 contained just 32 statements. This was replaced by IBM's FORTRAN II, which was released in 1958. While Fortran II added just six new statements, it had one big advantage it supported procedural programming by allowing user-written subroutines and functions.

But the most significant move forward was made when the American Standards Association (now called ANSI) approved an industry-standard version of FORTRAN in March 1966, called Fortran 66. Eleven years later, Fortran 77 was released.

FORTRAN today

While many newer languages, like C, C++ and Java have grown in popularity, FORTRAN is still being used. In 1991, Fortran 90 was introduced, which was followed by FORTRAN 95. Today, the most recent standard is FORTRAN 2003, which supports object oriented programming (OOPs). Efforts are on to develop a revision to FORTRAN 2003, tentatively called FORTRAN 2008. As you can see, FORTRAN, though an old language, is still alive and kicking. Of course, this said, there are some who believe that a computer without FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup!

Why high level?
If, as a programmer, you have never used assembly, you will asku2014why use a high level language?
While assembly language is blazingly fast, high level languages are easier to use and you can program in far smaller and simpler steps.

For instance, let's try to create a program that displays 'Hello, World' on the screen. This is extremely simple with a high-level language like FORTRAN or C:

FORTRAN:
PROGRAM HELLOW
WRITE(UNIT=*, FMT=*) 'Hello World'
END

C:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
u00a0printf("hello, world\n");
u00a0return 0;
}

But it is a lot tougher with assembly:
dosseg
.model small
.stack 100h
.data
hello_message db 'Hello, World!',0dh,0ah,'$'
.code
main proc
mov ax,@data
mov ds,ax
mov ah,9
mov dx,offset hello_message
int 21h
mov ax,4C00h
int 21h
main endp
end main
Now, imagine writing a huge program like a wordprocessor in assembly! And believe it or not, this is just what people had to do before high level languages like Fortran were written to ease the burden of programmers.