In order of importance: 1) built-in performant multidimensional arrays, incl. array expressions (similar to Matlab). Built-in nature means basically all numeri

In order of importance: 1) built-in performant multidimensional arrays, incl. array expressions (similar to Matlab). Built-in nature means basically all numerical libraries can easily talk to each other since they all use compatible data structures. 2) Fortran's syntax is performant by default, so scientists don't have to know as much to produce fast code. Best examples are default pass-by-reference and allocatables instead of pointers, which makes them non-aliased. 3) along same lines: intent system C: restrict const * const double x ... Fortran: real(8), intent(in), allocatable, dimension(n,m) :: x, y, z The second code is simply more expressive about what you think about when doing numerical programming.