FORTRAN programming language

The invention: The first major computer programming language, FORTRAN supported programming in a mathematical language that was natural to scientists and engineers and achieved unsurpassed success in scientific computation. The people behind the invention: John Backus (1924- ), an American software engineer and manager John W. Mauchly (1907-1980), an American physicist and engineer Herman Heine Goldstine (1913- ), a mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann (1903-1957), a Hungarian American mathematician and physicist Talking to Machines Formula Translation, or FORTRAN—the first widely accepted high-level computer language—was completed by John Backus and his coworkers at the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation in April, 1957. Designed to support programming in a mathematical language that was natural to scientists and engineers, FORTRAN achieved unsurpassed success in scientific computation. Computer languages are means of specifying the instructions that a computer should execute and the order of those instructions. Computer languages can be divided into categories of progressively higher degrees of abstraction. At the lowest level is binary code, or machine code: Binary digits, or “bits,” specify in complete detail every instruction that the machine will execute. This was the only language available in the early days of computers, when such machines as the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) required hand-operated switches and plugboard connections. All higher levels of language are implemented by having a program translate instructions written in the higher language into binary machine language (also called “object code”). High-level languages (also called “programming languages”) are largely or entirely independent of the underlying machine structure. FORTRAN was the first language of this type to win widespread acceptance. The emergence of machine-independent programming languages was a gradual process that spanned the first decade of electronic computation. One of the earliest developments was the invention of “flowcharts,” or “flow diagrams,” by Herman Heine Goldstine and John von Neumann in 1947. Flowcharting became the most influential software methodology during the first twenty years of computing. Short Code was the first language to be implemented that contained some high-level features, such as the ability to use mathematical equations. The idea came from JohnW. Mauchly, and it was implemented on the BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) in 1949 with an “interpreter”; later, it was carried over to the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) I. Interpreters are programs that do not translate commands into a series of object-code instructions; instead, they directly execute (interpret) those commands. Every time the interpreter encounters a command, that command must be interpreted again. “Compilers,” however, convert the entire command into object code before it is executed. Much early effort went into creating ways to handle commonly encountered problems—particularly scientific mathematical calculations. A number of interpretive languages arose to support these features. As long as such complex operations had to be performed by software (computer programs), however, scientific computation would be relatively slow. Therefore, Backus lobbied successfully for a direct hardware implementation of these operations on IBM’s new scientific computer, the 704. Backus then started the Programming Research Group at IBM in order to develop a compiler that would allow programs to be written in a mathematically oriented language rather than a machine-oriented language. In November of 1954, the group defined an initial version of FORTRAN.A More Accessible Language Before FORTRAN was developed, a computer had to perform a whole series of tasks to make certain types of mathematical calculations. FORTRAN made it possible for the same calculations to be performed much more easily. In general, FORTRAN supported constructs with which scientists were already acquainted, such as functions and multidimensional arrays. In defining a powerful notation that was accessible to scientists and engineers, FORTRAN opened up programming to a much wider community. Backus’s success in getting the IBM 704’s hardware to support scientific computation directly, however, posed a major challenge: Because such computation would be much faster, the object code produced by FORTRAN would also have to be much faster. The lower-level compilers preceding FORTRAN produced programs that were usually five to ten times slower than their hand-coded counterparts; therefore, efficiency became the primary design objective for Backus. The highly publicized claims for FORTRAN met with widespread skepticism among programmers. Much of the team’s efforts, therefore, went into discovering ways to produce the most efficient object code. The efficiency of the compiler produced by Backus, combined with its clarity and ease of use, guaranteed the system’s success. By 1959, many IBM 704 users programmed exclusively in FORTRAN. By 1963, virtually every computer manufacturer either had delivered or had promised a version of FORTRAN. Incompatibilities among manufacturers were minimized by the popularity of IBM’s version of FORTRAN; every company wanted to be able to support IBM programs on its own equipment. Nevertheless, there was sufficient interest in obtaining a standard for FORTRAN that the American National Standards Institute adopted a formal standard for it in 1966. Arevised standard was adopted in 1978, yielding FORTRAN 77. Consequences In demonstrating the feasibility of efficient high-level languages, FORTRAN inaugurated a period of great proliferation of programming languages. Most of these languages attempted to provide similar or better high-level programming constructs oriented toward a different, nonscientific programming environment. COBOL, for example, stands for “Common Business Oriented Language.” FORTRAN, while remaining the dominant language for scientific programming, has not found general acceptance among nonscientists. An IBM project established in 1963 to extend FORTRAN found the task too unwieldy and instead ended up producing an entirely different language, PL/I, which was delivered in 1966. In the beginning, Backus and his coworkers believed that their revolutionary language would virtually eliminate the burdens of coding and debugging. Instead, FORTRAN launched software as a field of study and an industry in its own right. In addition to stimulating the introduction of new languages, FORTRAN encouraged the development of operating systems. Programming languages had already grown into simple operating systems called “monitors.” Operating systems since then have been greatly improved so that they support, for example, simultaneously active programs (multiprogramming) and the networking (combining) of multiple computers.