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Why is Fortran used in HPC?
Fortran is optimized for array/matrix computations and is a thorough pain to work with for any type of text parsing. C and C++ may not match up with Fortran in numerical computing (it’s close),but I find it much easier to process text and organize data (i.e. custom data structures) with C/C++.
Is Fortran language still used?
Fortran is rarely used today in industry — one ranking ranks it behind 29 other languages. However, Fortran is still a dominant language for the large scale simulation of physical systems, ie. Modern Fortran also has a feature called ‘coarrays’ which puts parallelization features directly into the language.
Why is Fortran so fast?
The compiler is not allowed to use MOVDQU due to the semantics of C. Fortran semantics say that function arguments never alias and there is an array type, where in C arrays are pointers. This is why Fortran is often faster than C. This is why numerical libraries are still written in Fortran.
What is the difference between FORTRAN and Cobol?
FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation. This clearly means that it is aimed at engineering or scientific purposes. COBOL, on the other hand, stands for Common Business-Oriented Language and is meant to be used for business-related tasks such as data processing.
What FORTRAN means?
FORTRAN, in full Formula Translation, computer programming language created in 1957 by John Backus that shortened the process of programming and made computer programming more accessible.
Why was Fortran language created?
One of the oldest programming languages, the FORTRAN was developed by a team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus, and was first published in 1957. The name FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code.