Although Fortran is not a pleasant language to use, it does have the advantages of universality and (usually) relative efficiency. The Ratfor language attempts to conceal the main deficiencies of Fortran while retaining its desirable qualities, by providing decent control flow statements: statement grouping if-else and switch for decision-making while, for, do, and repeat-until for looping brea...

A new application programming interface forevaluating functions and specifying optimization problems atruntime has been developed. The new interface, named FEFAR,uses a simple language named LEFAR. Compared with othermodeling languages such as AMPL or OSil, LEFAR is Fortran-like hence easy to learn and use, in particular for Fortranprogrammers. FEFAR itself is a Fortran ...

The Fortran (FORmula TRANslating) computer language was the result of a project begun by John Backus at IBM in 1954. The goal of this project was to provide a way for programmers to express mathematical formulas through a formalism that computers could translate into machine instructions. Initially there was a great deal of skepticism about the efficacy of such a scheme. “How,’’ the scientists ...

We compare the capabilities of several commercially available, vectorizing Fortran compilers using a test suite of Fortran loops. We present the results of compiling and executing these loops on a variety of supercomputers, mini-supercomputers, and mainframes.

This special issue of Scientific Programming is devoted to celebration of fifty years of mutual and remarkable growth of both scientific programming and its primary language, Fortran. In this brief introduction, we will remark on the past, the present and the future of Fortran and summarize the papers included in this issue. Although the first specification of the Fortran language was released ...