Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Fortran

Fortran was developed by IBM in the 1950s for engineering and scientific applications. Its popularity spread quickly in areas of science that are dominated by numeric computation. Today, many of those same Fortran programs are still maintained and in use in fields such as weather modeling and prediction, fluid dynamics, and segments of chemistry and physics. In a published article from 2010, Eugene Loh, an engineer at Oracle, called Fortran the most commonly used and perhaps the ideal language for high performance computing (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1820518).

Fortran is a terse language in which complex applications may be written with relatively few statements. It is a procedural language with object-oriented abilities. It ...