why was FORTRAN developed?

Question

why was FORTRAN developed?

Answer 1

@ Frank Lynn - Me too.



I once had a lab assignment in thermodynamics where we were given a data acquisition's program in FORTRAN and told to debug it to read the results of a test. I threw up my hands and figured out how to read the data into Lotus 1-2-3. The results were the same.

Answer 2

In the 1950's, any computation done on a computer was performed by programming in machine language, which was tedious and hard to follow (if you've ever seen an assembly language code, imagine it without the mnemonic, and you would have a good idea what it was like).

This was actually slowing down the development of code, and John Backus proposed that IBM allowed him to set up a team to search for an alternate approach, that of developing a program that would translate high level, readable instructions into assembly. The result of this initiative was the development of the first Fortran compiler, which proved good enough -- the resulting assembly was almost as efficient as if it had been directly coded by an expert using all the tricks in the book.



One note here, at the intention of anther answerer: the GOTO is NOT forbidden. Some do claim that is an ugly construct, and could lead to confusing code, which may be a point (well written, a code could be as decent using GOTO as using any other sturtured appraoch). But the bottom line is, at the machine level, in assembly/machine language, there are ONLY GOTO's (no WHILE, no REPEAT, no ELSE; all those instructions unroll to a bunch of GOTO's once compiled), so even the recommendation to avoid GOTO (the famous "GOTO considered harmful" by Edsger Dijkstra, which prompted a rebuttal called "'GOTO considered harmful'considered harmful", which escalated to at least two more layer of "considered harmful" encapsulation) cannot be taken as an absolute.

Answer 3

A better question would be, "Why was any programing language developed?"



I learned Fortran many moons ago while in school and never used it again. We learned it to understand programming languages as the next logical step above machine language. That was right about the time desk top PC's came about. Now, we wonder why we have Fortran, basic, Cobol, etc.



Oh, back to your answer. Programming languages were developed to make instruction sets to a computer more word like and not just ones and zeros, or hexadecimal, or BCD code.

Answer 4

Fortran was the first generation programing language written in English Programing Instruction rather than using difficulty Machine Language. It was consider an user friendly computer language in those old days. Its famous GO TO instruction made each program package became difficult to understand among

programmers.Therefore, later on GO TO instruction was prohibit.

Answer 5

assembler for machine language



visual basic for interactive programming,



all computer compilers are written in assembler. assembler is a prime language. but assembler is difficult to understand as it is not in plain english. so the computer scientist write secondary compilers which is more understandable and easily read such as fortran and cobol by using assembler.



and scientists invent fortran and now visual fortran for batch jobs solving scientific problems and displace the results graphically.



cobol in more plain english for commercial problems so the programmer will make less mistakes especially for banks, and people with less programming skills can read it too.



and c++ for secrecy and it's more close to a machine language so it's more efficient than fortran. and u can hide the subroutine in c++ so nobody can read the algorithm except the programmer.



autolisp for autocad.



now, they have java, html for internet.

Answer 6

FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation and was developed for the transmutation and manipulation of scientific formulae within a digitalized framework.