Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited for numeric computation and scientific computing. Since 2003, standard Fortran also supports object-oriented programming. Fortran 2008 introduced coarrays for SPMD parallel programming. This tag should be applied to all questions about the Fortran language; other specific tags can be added for compilers, language revisions and particular aspects of use.
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially used for numeric computation and scientific computing.
It has a long history and is still evolving: the first language proposal was put together by J. W. Backus in 1953, the first international standard was approved in 1966, and the latest major standard revision (with new features), Fortran 2018, was published in 2018. The next revision, Fortran 2023, is under development.
Fortran is widely used in the scientific computing community and accounts for an important part of numerical codes run in supercomputing facilities.
Hello world in Fortran
program hello
print *, 'Hello, world!'
end program
Related tags
Language feature tags:
- fortran-iso-c-binding regarding the C interoperability facility (not restricted to the intrinsic module)
- fortran-common-block regarding the (problematic) use of common blocks
Compiler tags:
- gfortran for the Fortran compiler component of GCC
- xl-fortran for the IBM XL Fortran compiler
- intel-fortran for Intel's Fortran development suite
- nag-fortran for NAG's compiler (nagfor) and Fortran numerical library
- nvidia-hpc-compilers for NVIDIA's HPC SDK compilers
- pgi-visual-fortran for PGI's compiler and tools
- silverfrost-fortran for the Silverfrost compiler (Salford FTN95)
There are also language revision tags: fortran77, fortran90, fortran95, fortran2003, fortran2008 and fortran2018. These tags are rarely necessary as there is limited incompatibility introduced in succeeding revisions and context should make language feature support clear.
Useful Links
- The Fortran Wiki, a collaborative wiki for discussing Fortran
- Wikipedia's History of Fortran
- Wikipedia's Fortran 95 language features
Standard Documents
- FORTRAN 66
- FORTRAN 77
- Fortran 90
- Fortran 95
- Fortran 2003 (The new features of Fortran 2003)
- Fortran 2008 (The new features of Fortran 2008)
- extended by Technical Specification TS29113 Further Interoperability of Fortran with C
- extended by Techincal Specification TS18508 Additional Parallel Features in Fortran
- Fortran 2018 (The new features of Fortran 2018)
