Definition of Fortran in English:


(also FORTRAN)


  • A high-level computer programming language used especially for scientific computation.

    • ‘It is difficult to see how any language that could actually be run on a physical computer could do more than Fortran can do.’
    • ‘In the mid 1980's, while other schools were struggling to keep their Apple IIs up to date, O'Neill's high school was teaching its students how to program C, Fortran, and Cobol.’
    • ‘We had the same arguments with high level languages with Fortran in the Sixties.’
    • ‘In 1979, my dad was taking courses at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, programming in Fortran on the campus mainframe.’
    • ‘Back in the misty, early days of computing, famed computer scientist John Backus invented a programming language called Fortran.’
    • ‘Matlab stores arrays like Fortran does, in that data in a particular matrix column is contiguous in memory.’
    • ‘Also, they overlook the fact that enormous bodies of code already exist in such languages as C and Fortran to solve complex, computationally intensive applications.’
    • ‘This has now been extended to support some 20 different languages including, in announcements made this week, both Fortran and RPG.’
    • ‘I'm looking forward to getting started working on the parallel machines they've got lying about, and programming Fortran, naturally.’
    • ‘The Carte programming environment performs the compilation from C or Fortran to bitstream for the FPGA without programmer involvement.’
    • ‘The models - actually complicated software written in a computer language called Fortran - attempt to account for everything happening in the atmosphere on a global basis.’
    • ‘Finally, hands up anyone who's still cutting code in either Cobol or Fortran - yes, it's time to come out of the closet!’
    • ‘Microsoft, in the shape of Gates and Paul Allen, kicked off with Basic, and followed up in 1978 with Fortran.’
    • ‘With Fortran and the languages that followed, programmers finally had the tools they needed to get into really serious trouble.’
    • ‘Programming is typically done in ANSI C, C + +, and Fortran 90.’
    • ‘Several compilers, including the Convex and the Fujitsu Fortran Compilers, permitted applications that were written in standard Fortran 77 to be vectorized.’
    • ‘Three months had been used to develop and test the user interface between Fortran and the Web server and the potential user.’


1950s: contraction of formula translation.