Category:Fortran: Difference between revisions

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FORTRAN 77, being quite old, lacks almost everything one expects from a modern programming language. It uses a fixed-length line and column oriented line format which was motivated by punch cards. Due to its age, and since FORTRAN compilers generally gave very good performance for numerical code, a lot of code, especially scientific code, was written in FORTRAN. Also, for quite a while there was no free Fortran 90 compiler, which also caused a lot of FORTRAN 77 code to be written even quite some time after Fortran 90 was standardized. Because of the biglarge body of code written in FORTRAN 77 it's stillremains relevant today. Indeed, every modern Fortran compiler still hasaccepts toFORTRAN accept77 the old formatcode.

Fortran 90 was a major steprevision inof the development of Fortranlanguage. It introduced a new free-form source code format, modern programming language features like modules, pointers and user-defined types, an improved type system for built-in types and superiour built-in array handling. Newer Fortran standards (Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008) added further modern features, like support for [[object oriented programming]], [[inheritance]], [[polymorphism]], [[parallel processing]], and [[interoperability]] with the [[:Category:C|C programming language]].