Fortran belongs to a class of higher-level programming languages in which the programs are not written directly in the machine code but instead in an artificial, human-readable language. This source code consists of algorithms built using a set of standard constructions, each consisting of a series of commands which define the elementary operations with your data.
Fortran is one of the earliest programming languages and was designed specifically for solving scientific and engineering computational problems. The work on Fortran started in the 1950's at IBM and there have been many versions since. By convention, a Fortran version is denoted by the last two digits of the year the standard was proposed. Therefore, we have Fortran 66, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 (95).
For the past 50 years Fortran has been used for such projects as the design of bridges and aeroplane structures, it is used for factory automation control, for storm drainage design, analysis of scientific data and so on. Throughout the life of this language, groups of users have written libraries of useful standard Fortran programs.
Fortran programming language
