history and purpose

FORTRAN
  • 1957, J. Backus at IBM
  • procedural language
    (good for describing do-this-now-do-this)
  • number-crunching language
    emphasis on numerical functions with arrays
C
  • 1972, D. Ritchi at Bell Labs
  • general applications-programming language
    well-defined ways of referring to memory, built-in means of sharing information among modules
  • grew up with Unix
  • structured language
    procedural, plus a flexible means of assigning interpretation to data
  • very small
    (similar to FORTRAN 77)
  • low level
    emphasis memory location (pointers),
    "high-level assembler language"
    naturally interoperable with outside libraries, other languages
FORTRAN 90/95
  • structured
    (TYPE, and MODULE)
  • has pointers
    (but not pointers to memory
  • much of what you learn about C can be applied to FORTRAN 90