It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers. It has been in use for over six decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (15 October 1956), the first programmer's reference manual for Fortranįortran ( / ˈ f ɔːr t r æ n/ formerly FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.įortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing.
