Fortan is -undoubtedly- thought as a HPC. That doesn't mean it's great or I would use it today, but yes, without a doubt it is one of such languages. That's no

Fortan is -undoubtedly- thought as a HPC. That doesn't mean it's great or I would use it today, but yes, without a doubt it is one of such languages. That's not to say that if today I had to write, as I do, a tight CPU kernel, I would not chose C or C++, these have the best compilers and tools and are more general languages. But C++ was never designed to aid stuff like numerical computation, never. It was designed to be zero-overhead on top of C if you didn't use any feature with overhead. That means that it can go all the way down to C performance, and C is considered almost as a portable assembly, so it's quite low-level. Low-level and high performance are not entirely the same thing! In fact you can easily, easily outperform -standard- C++ in many interpreted languages that support vector operations or GPU offloading, for example matlab. If you want a c-like cpu hpc language for tight numerical kernels to integrate with c functions, look for Intel's ISPC