Fortran is the most widely used programming language in the world for numerical applications. It has achieved this position partly by being on the scene earlier than any of the other major languages and partly because it seems gradually to have evolved the features which its users, especially scientists and engineers, found most useful. In order to retain compatibility with old programs, Fortran has advanced mainly by adding new features rather than by removing old ones. The net result is, of course, that some parts of the language are, by present standards, rather archaic: some of these can be avoided easily, others can still be a nuisance.
This section gives a brief history of the language, outlines its future prospects, and summarises its strengths and weaknesses.
Fortran was invented by a team of programmers working for IBM in the early nineteen-fifties. This group, led by John Backus, produced the first compiler, for an IBM 704 computer, in 1957. They used the name Fortran because one of their principal aims was ``formula translation". But Fortran was in fact one of the very first high-level language: it came complete with control structures and facilities for input/output. Fortran became popular quite rapidly and compilers were soon produced for other IBM machines. Before long other manufacturers were forced to design Fortran compilers for their own hardware. By 1963 all the major manufacturers had joined in and there were dozens of different Fortran compilers in existence, many of them rather more powerful than the original.
All this resulted in a chaos of incompatible dialects. Some order was restored in 1966 when an American national standard was defined for Fortran. This was the first time that a standard had ever been produced for a computer programming language. Although it was very valuable, it hardly checked the growth of the language. Quite deliberately the Fortran66 standard only specified a set of language features which had to be present: it did not prevent other features being added. As time went on these extensions proliferated and the need for a further standardization exercise became apparent. This eventually resulted in the current version of the language: Fortran77.
One of the most important features of Fortran programs is their portability, that is the ease with which they can be moved from one computer system to another. Now that each generation of hardware succeeds the previous one every few years, while good software often lasts for much longer, more and more programs need to be portable. The growth in computer networks is also encouraging the development of portable programs.
The first step in achieving portability is to ensure that a standard form of programming language is acceptable everywhere. This need is now widely recognised and has resulted in the development of standards for all the major programming languages. In practice, however, many of the new standards have been ignored and standard-conforming systems for languages like Basic and Pascal are still very rare.
Fortunately Fortran is in much better shape: almost all current Fortran systems are designed to conform to the standard usually called Fortran77. This was produced in 1977 by a committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and was subsequently adopted by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The definition was published as ANSI X3.9-1978 and ISO 1539-1980. The term ``Standard Fortran" will be used in the rest of this book to refer to mean Fortran77 according to this definition.
Fortran is now one of the most widely used computer languages in the world with compilers available for almost every type of computer on the market. Since Fortran77 is quite good at handling character strings as well as numbers and also has powerful file-handling and input/output facilities, it is suitable for a much wider range of applications than before.
The ANSI Standard actually defines two different levels for Fortran77. The simpler form, subset Fortran, was intended for use on computers which were too small to handle the full language. Now that even personal computers are powerful enough to handle full Fortran77, subset Fortran is practically obsolete. This book, therefore, only describes full Fortran77.
The ISO Standard for Fortran90 has, officially, replaced that for Fortran77. It introduces a wealth of new features many of them already in use in other high-level languages, which will make programming easier, and facilitate the construction of portable and robust programs. The whole of the Fortran77 Standard is included as a proper subset, so existing (standard-conforming) Fortran programs will automatically conform also to the new Standard. Until well-tested compilers for Fortran90 are widespread, however, most programmers are still using Fortran77, with perhaps a few minor extensions.
Fortran has become popular and widespread because of its unique combination of properties. Its numerical and input/output facilities are almost unrivalled while those for logic and character handling are as good as most other languages. Fortran is simple enough that you do not need to be a computer specialist to become familiar with it fairly quickly, yet it has features, such as the independent compilation of program units, which allow it to be used on very large applications. Programs written in Fortran are also more portable than those in other major languages. The efficiency of compiled code also tends to be quite high because the language is straight-forward to compile and techniques for handling Fortran have reached a considerable degree of refinement. Finally, the ease with which existing procedures can be incorporated into new software makes it especially easy to develop new programs out of old ones.
It cannot be denied, however, that Fortran has more than its fair share of weaknesses and drawbacks. Many of these have existed in Fortran since it was first invented and ought to have been eliminated long ago: examples include the 6-character limit on symbolic names, the fixed statement layout, and the need to use statement labels.
Fortran also has rather liberal rules and an extensive system of default values: while this reduces programming effort it also makes it harder for the system to detect the programmer's mistakes. In many other programming languages, for example, the data type of every variable has to be declared in advance. Fortran does not insist on this but, in consequence, if you make a spelling mistake in a variable name the compiler is likely to use two variables when you only intended to use one. Such errors can be serious but are not always easy to detect.
Fortran also lacks various control and data structures which simplify programming languages with a more modern design. These limitations, and others, are all eliminated with the advent of Fortran90.
Computer manufacturers have a natural tendency to compete with each other by providing Fortran systems which are ``better" than before, usually by providing extensions to the language. This does not conflict with the Fortran Standard, provided that standard-conforming programs are still processed correctly. Indeed in the long term languages advance by the absorbtion of such extensions. In the short term, however, their use is more problematical, since they necessarily makes programs less portable.
When the latest Fortran Standard was issued in 1977 there was fairly widespread disappointment that it did not go just a little further in eliminating some of the tiresome restrictions that had persisted since the early days. The US Department of Defense issued a short list of extensions which manufacturers were encouraged to add to their Fortran77 systems. The most important of these were the following:
Many Fortran systems, especially those produced in the United States, now support these extensions but they are by no means universal and should not be used in portable programs.
One of the most irksome restrictions of Fortran77 is that symbolic names cannot be more than six characters long. This forces programmers to devise all manner of contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms in place of meaningful symbolic names. It is very tempting to take advantage of systems which relax this rule but this can have serious repercussions. Consider a program which makes use of variables called TEMPERATURE and TEMPERED. Many compilers will be quite happy with these, though a few will reject both names on grounds of length. Unfortunately there are also one or two compilers in existence which will simply ignore all letters after the sixth so that both names will be taken as references to the same variable, TEMPER. Such behaviour, while deplorable, is quite in accordance with the Standard which only requires systems to compile programs correctly if they conform to its rules.
The only way to be certain of avoiding problems like this is to ignore such temptations entirely and just use Standard Fortran. Many compilers provide a switch or option which can be set to cause all non-standard syntax to be flagged. Everything covered in this book is part of Standard Fortran unless clearly marked to the contrary.
Computer programming always requires a very high standard of care and accuracy if it is to be successful. This is even more vital when using Fortran than with some other languages, because, as explained above, the liberal rules of Fortran make it harder for the system to detect mistakes. To program successfully it is not enough just to conform to the rules of the language, it is also important to defend yourself against known pitfalls.
There is a useful lesson to be learned from the failure of one of the
earliest planetary probes launched by NASA. The cause of the
failure was eventually traced to a statement in its control software
similar to this:
DO 15 I = 1.100
when what should have been written was:
DO 15 I = 1,100
but somehow a dot had replaced the comma. Because Fortran
ignores spaces, this was seen by the compiler as:
DO15I = 1.100
which is a perfectly valid assignment to a variable called DO15I
and not at all what was intended.
Fortran77 permits an additional comma to be inserted after the
label in a DO statement, so it could now be written as:
DO 15,I = 1,100
which has the great advantage that it is no longer as vulnerable to a
single-point failure.
There are many hazards of this sort in Fortran, but the risk of falling victim to them can be minimised by adopting the programming practices of more experienced users. To help you, various recommendations and guidelines are given throughout this book. Some of the most outdated and unsatisfactory features of Fortran are not described in the main part of the book at all but have been relegated to section 13.
There is not room in a book of this size to go further into the techniques of program design and software engineering. As far as possible everything recommended here is consistent with the methods of modular design and structured programming, but you should study these topics in more detail before embarking on any large-scale programming projects.