Home » Technology » Scientific Computing » Fortran in the Next Century

Fortran in the Next Century

© Adam Hughes

It's been said that old habits die hard and that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. If you buy those cliches and take a look at the title of this article, you'll probably quickly come to the conclusion that fortran is about to be thrashed as a hopelessly outdated programming language for use in scientific computing. However, while many practices in the scientific community are continued ad infinitum due to a sense of tradition or a refusal to change procedures, fortran can still be a very valuable tool to the researcher.

Fortran's rise to prominence can be traced back to the time of the hole-punching computer programmers. In those halcion days of yore, the trusty local computer was fed a series of cards, each with a pattern of holes that corresponded to instructions which the machine could read in and decipher. Punching the holes was the equivalent to writing computer code from the keyboard today.

To make matters worse, instructions often had to be entered in a "language" the computer could understand, which basically means a set of 1's and 0's signifying on/off switches to individual bits. As one might imagine, it was a pretty tedious job to write a program with much complexity at all, as each instruction had to be punched out on the cards. It was important, therefore, to try and find some way of making the program easier for the human to understand. Basically, this was the impetus for the development of programming languages. The first languages weren't very human-readable, but they gradually came to look more and more like real dialects. In this vain, fortran was really the first widely-used "high-level" language, where high-level signifies that the user is far removed from the machine language.

Fortran allowed developers to use the equivalents of human words to tell the computer what to do, and so it was heartily embraced. As computers advanced in their sophistication, fortran remained a staple because it could be taught to neophytes and used to created very effficient scientific code. Fortran has been passed down through scientific families like great, great, great, great, granddad's watch, but in this case it is just as robust and vital as ever. While other languages have come along to offer attractive features to the code developer, fortran is always there, and is often called upon to solve quick problems or to produce an efficient piece of code. Given its legacy, and the fact that new versions offer many of the features available in other languages, it appears fortran will remain a welcome guest in the scientific community for some time to come.

The copyright of the article Fortran in the Next Century in Scientific Computing is owned by . Permission to republish Fortran in the Next Century in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.