OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford discovered that even though it’s very different from modern languages, it’s easy to get up to speed with the original FORTRAN as it has just 32 instructions.
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If you catch the FORTRAN bug, you might be interested to learn about the open source LFortran project. Put simply, it’s an interactive version of FORTRAN that enables you to try out ideas, getting immediate results, without having to compile any code. In this respect, it’s been likened to Python, MATLAB and Julia.
When FORTRAN was first conceived, there were barely any high-level languages, and certainly none that became widely known. With such languages now virtually universal, we need to remember that high-level languages were designed to ease the job of a programmer. Previously, code was written in a computer’s native instructions, which were defined by the computer’s hardware. Using a high-level language, it became possible to use instructions that were closer to how humans would define the solution to a problem. Productivity gains, it was argued, would follow. Programs could also be transportable between different computers, although this wasn’t a consideration when designing FORTRAN, because the language was initially designed specifically for the IBM 704 computer.
The original FORTRAN was introduced in 1957 and had just 32 instructions, a far cry from most of today’s languages. What’s more, several of these instructions were tied up to the IBM 704’s hardware, so they were removed from later versions that were intended to be hardware independent.
If you want to try your hand at coding in FORTRAN 1957-style, you’re not going to find an IBM 704 FORTRAN compiler. However, with the exception of removing some of the original FORTRAN’s 704-specific instructions, each version of FORTRAN retained most, but not all, of the instructions of its predecessors for
