CS 342 Lecture -*- Outline -*-

* History and goals of FORTRAN
** Goals
	John Backus (1953)
		write programs in conventional mathematical notation
		generate code comparable to good assembly language programmer
** History
	-No language design effort as such (made it up as they went along)
	-Spent most of time on code generation/optimization techniques

	FORTRAN I Released April 1957, working by April 1958

	Improvements
	FORTRAN II, Sept. 1957 (included subroutines)
	FORTRAN IV, 1962 (ANSI Standard) (What we mean when we say "FORTRAN")
			took out some machine dependencies
	FORTRAN 77, new standard includes structured statements...

	Possibly the most widely used computer language (esp. in science)
		==> portable
		==> but not the best, even for numerical work
	The first compiled programming language (example of first generation)
		a great advance for its time