Video: What’s New with Fortran?

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us__en_us__ibm100__fortran__board_game__586x800In this video, David Bolton from Slashdot looks at changed with Fortran over the past 60 years and why it’s still a key tool for the engineering and scientific communities.

“Fortran is a programming language mainly used by the scientific community. Its name is a contraction of FORmula TRANslation, and its aim is to provide a way to tell computers to calculate complicated mathematical expressions, with more ease than assembly language. FORTRAN is one of the earliest programming languages. The original versions used punched cards to write programs with. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.”

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