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It's been about 30 years since I last wrote FORTRAN (77), but back then it was used in computationally intensive applications because it was (or at least felt)
by kitd 3y ago
It's been about 30 years since I last wrote FORTRAN (77), but back then it was used in computationally intensive applications because it was (or at least felt) like working much closer to the bare-metal data and code segments of a process than a 'high-level' language like C. Certainly the compilers produced far fewer lines of assembly/line of source compared to C, pushing the burden of correctness back on the programmer. It was almost like working with an assembly macro language.
I suspect much has changed since though, so its fields of use may just be convention now.
- m463 3y agoI vaguely remember early fortran code was really close to 1:1 source code -> assembly language. Probably just because that's how low-level compilers were. I also remember from the era, that a one-line program with a '.' in column 6 would generate 600 lines of errors from the IBM optimizing cobol compiler.