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72-557: With Dhrystone, Weicker gathered meta-data from a broad range of software, including programs written in FORTRAN , PL/1 , SAL, ALGOL 68 , and Pascal . He then characterized these programs in terms of various common constructs: procedure calls, pointer indirections , assignments, etc. From this he wrote the Dhrystone benchmark to correspond to a representative mix. Dhrystone was published in Ada , with

144-567: A Formula Translating System , and printed the name with small caps , Fortran . Other sources suggest the name stands for Formula Translator , or Formula Translation . Early IBM computers did not support lowercase letters, and the names of versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were usually spelled in all- uppercase . FORTRAN 77 was the last version in which the Fortran character set included only uppercase letters. The official language standards for Fortran have referred to

216-490: A high-level programming language replacement. John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think , the IBM employee magazine, "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 , writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs." The language

288-447: A square wave at the same frequency for digital electronics applications (or, when using a CPU multiplier , some fixed multiple of the crystal reference frequency). The clock distribution network inside the CPU carries that clock signal to all the parts that need it. An A/D Converter has a "clock" pin driven by a similar system to set the sampling rate . With any particular CPU, replacing

360-401: A "cumulative clock rate" measure is sometimes assumed by taking the total cores and multiplying by the total clock rate (e.g. a dual-core 2.8 GHz processor running at a cumulative 5.6 GHz). There are many other factors to consider when comparing the performance of CPUs, like the width of the CPU's data bus , the latency of the memory, and the cache architecture. The clock rate alone

432-401: A "maximum clock rate" specification, and they test chips before selling them to make sure they meet that specification, even when executing the most complicated instructions with the data patterns that take the longest to settle (testing at the temperature and voltage that gives the lowest performance). Processors successfully tested for compliance with a given set of standards may be labeled with

504-496: A card reader to be compiled. Punched card codes included no lower-case letters or many special characters, and special versions of the IBM 026 keypunch were offered that would correctly print the re-purposed special characters used in FORTRAN. Reflecting punched card input practice, Fortran programs were originally written in a fixed-column format, with the first 72 columns read into twelve 36-bit words. A letter "C" in column 1 caused

576-507: A character data type (Fortran 77), structured programming , array programming , modular programming , generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing ( Fortran 95 ), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008). Since April 2024, Fortran has ranked among the top ten languages in the TIOBE index , a measure of the popularity of programming languages. The first manual for FORTRAN describes it as

648-577: A computer, an idea developed by J. Halcombe Laning and demonstrated in the Laning and Zierler system of 1952. A draft specification for The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by November 1954. The first manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956, with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. Fortran produced efficient enough code for assembly language programmers to accept

720-452: A de facto standard), and Basic FORTRAN (based on FORTRAN II, but stripped of its machine-dependent features). The FORTRAN defined by the first standard, officially denoted X3.9-1966, became known as FORTRAN 66 (although many continued to term it FORTRAN IV, the language on which the standard was largely based). FORTRAN 66 effectively became the first industry-standard version of FORTRAN. FORTRAN 66 included: The above Fortran II version of

792-468: A higher clock rate, e.g., 3.50 GHz, while those that fail the standards of the higher clock rate yet pass the standards of a lower clock rate may be labeled with the lower clock rate, e.g., 3.3 GHz, and sold at a lower price. The clock rate of a CPU is normally determined by the frequency of an oscillator crystal . Typically a crystal oscillator produces a fixed sine wave —the frequency reference signal. Electronic circuitry translates that into

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864-470: A limit of six characters in FORTRAN II. If A, B, and C cannot represent the sides of a triangle in plane geometry, then the program's execution will end with an error code of "STOP 1". Otherwise, an output line will be printed showing the input values for A, B, and C, followed by the computed AREA of the triangle as a floating-point number occupying ten spaces along the line of output and showing 2 digits after

936-652: A little more quickly or use slightly less energy per transition, pushing back those limits, producing new CPUs that can run at slightly higher clock rates. The ultimate limits to energy per transition are explored in reversible computing . The first fully reversible CPU, the Pendulum, was implemented using standard CMOS transistors in the late 1990s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineers also continue to find new ways to design CPUs so that they complete more instructions per clock cycle, thus achieving

1008-430: A lower CPI (cycles or clock cycles per instruction) count, although they may run at the same or a lower clock rate as older CPUs. This is achieved through architectural techniques such as instruction pipelining and out-of-order execution which attempts to exploit instruction level parallelism in the code. The clock rate of a CPU is most useful for providing comparisons between CPUs in the same family. The clock rate

1080-413: A number of significant features to address many of the shortcomings of FORTRAN 66: In this revision of the standard, a number of features were removed or altered in a manner that might invalidate formerly standard-conforming programs. (Removal was the only allowable alternative to X3J3 at that time, since the concept of " deprecation " was not yet available for ANSI standards.) While most of the 24 items in

1152-411: A problem. IBM's FORTRAN II appeared in 1958. The main enhancement was to support procedural programming by allowing user-written subroutines and functions which returned values with parameters passed by reference . The COMMON statement provided a way for subroutines to access common (or global ) variables. Six new statements were introduced: Over the next few years, FORTRAN II added support for

1224-439: A program deck and add sequence numbers. Some early compilers, e.g., the IBM 650's, had additional restrictions due to limitations on their card readers. Keypunches could be programmed to tab to column 7 and skip out after column 72. Later compilers relaxed most fixed-format restrictions, and the requirement was eliminated in the Fortran 90 standard. Within the statement field, whitespace characters (blanks) were ignored outside

1296-450: A range of compiler techniques. Yet it was carefully crafted so as not to change the underlying benchmark. This effort to foil compilers was only partly successful. Dhrystone 2.1, released in May of the same year, had some minor changes and as of July 2010 remains the current definition of Dhrystone. Other than issues related to compiler optimization, various other issues have been cited with

1368-409: A simple means for FORTRAN 77 programmers to issue POSIX system calls. Over 100 calls were defined in the document – allowing access to POSIX-compatible process control, signal handling, file system control, device control, procedure pointing, and stream I/O in a portable manner. The much-delayed successor to FORTRAN 77, informally known as Fortran 90 (and prior to that, Fortran 8X ),

1440-456: A simplified, interpreted version of FORTRAN I (with only 12 statements not 32) for "load and go" operation was available (at least for the early IBM 1620 computer). Modern Fortran, and almost all later versions, are fully compiled, as done for other high-performance languages. The development of Fortran paralleled the early evolution of compiler technology , and many advances in the theory and design of compilers were specifically motivated by

1512-487: A stack is maintained by software and the return address is stored on the stack before the call is made and restored after the call returns. Although not specified in FORTRAN 77, many F77 compilers supported recursion as an option, and the Burroughs mainframes , designed with recursion built-in, did so by default. It became a standard in Fortran 90 via the new keyword RECURSIVE. This program, for Heron's formula , reads data on

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1584-432: A tape reel containing three 5-digit integers A, B, and C as input. There are no "type" declarations available: variables whose name starts with I, J, K, L, M, or N are "fixed-point" (i.e. integers), otherwise floating-point. Since integers are to be processed in this example, the names of the variables start with the letter "I". The name of a variable must start with a letter and can continue with both letters and digits, up to

1656-472: A target for commercial compiler writers. Various modern compiler static code analysis techniques (such as elimination of dead code : for example, code which uses the processor but produces internal results which are not used or output) make the use and design of synthetic benchmarks more difficult. Version 2.0 of the benchmark, released by Weicker and Richardson in March 1988, had a number of changes intended to foil

1728-414: A text literal. This allowed omitting spaces between tokens for brevity or including spaces within identifiers for clarity. For example, AVG OF X was a valid identifier, equivalent to AVGOFX , and 101010 DO101I = 1 , 101 was a valid statement, equivalent to 10101 DO 101 I = 1 , 101 because the zero in column 6 is treated as if it were a space (!), while 101010 DO101I = 1.101

1800-541: Is a third generation , compiled , imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing . Fortran was originally developed by IBM . It first compiled correctly in 1958. Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction , finite element analysis , computational fluid dynamics , plasma physics , geophysics , computational physics , crystallography and computational chemistry . It

1872-491: Is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers . Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax. Successive versions have added support for

1944-522: Is also surpassed by the slightly slower AMD FX-8370 overclocked to 8.72 GHz which tops off the HWBOT frequency rankings. These records were broken in late 2022 when an Intel Core i9-13900K was overclocked to 9.008 GHz. The highest base clock rate on a production processor is the i9-14900KS , clocked at 6.2 GHz, which was released in Q1 2024. Engineers continue to find new ways to design CPUs that settle

2016-481: Is commonly advertised in gigahertz (GHz). This metric is most useful when comparing processors within the same family, holding constant other features that may affect performance . Manufacturers of modern processors typically charge higher prices for processors that operate at higher clock rates, a practice called binning . For a given CPU, the clock rates are determined at the end of the manufacturing process through testing of each processor. Chip manufacturers publish

2088-419: Is determined by a random number generator suitably weighted according to whatever FREQUENCY statements have been provided. The first FORTRAN compiler reported diagnostic information by halting the program when an error was found and outputting an error code on its console. That code could be looked up by the programmer in an error messages table in the operator's manual, providing them with a brief description of

2160-401: Is generally considered to be an inaccurate measure of performance when comparing different CPUs families. Software benchmarks are more useful. Clock rates can sometimes be misleading since the amount of work different CPUs can do in one cycle varies. For example, superscalar processors can execute more than one instruction per cycle (on average), yet it is not uncommon for them to do "less" in

2232-476: Is only one of several factors that can influence performance when comparing processors in different families. For example, an IBM PC with an Intel 80486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast (internally only) as one with the same CPU and memory running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors that implement different architectures and microarchitectures. Further,

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2304-501: Is to prepare for section 5 a table of predecessors (PRED table) which enumerates the basic blocks and lists for every basic block each of the basic blocks which can be its immediate predecessor in flow, together with the absolute frequency of each such basic block link. This table is obtained by running the program once in Monte-Carlo fashion, in which the outcome of conditional transfers arising out of IF-type statements and computed GO TO's

2376-487: The DOUBLE PRECISION and COMPLEX data types. Early FORTRAN compilers supported no recursion in subroutines. Early computer architectures supported no concept of a stack, and when they did directly support subroutine calls, the return location was often stored in one fixed location adjacent to the subroutine code (e.g. the IBM 1130 ) or a specific machine register ( IBM 360 et seq ), which only allows recursion if

2448-552: The C version for Unix developed by Rick Richardson ("version 1.1") greatly contributing to its popularity. The Dhrystone benchmark contains no floating point operations, thus the name is a pun on the then-popular Whetstone benchmark for floating point operations. The output from the benchmark is the number of Dhrystones per second (the number of iterations of the main code loop per second). Both Whetstone and Dhrystone are synthetic benchmarks, meaning that they are simple programs that are carefully designed to statistically mimic

2520-589: The ENIAC , used a 100 kHz clock in its cycling unit. As each instruction took 20 cycles, it had an instruction rate of 5 kHz. The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800 (by MITS), used an Intel 8080 CPU with a clock rate of 2 MHz (2 million cycles per second). The original IBM PC (c. 1981) had a clock rate of 4.77 MHz (4,772,727 cycles per second). In 1992, both Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) exceeded 100 MHz with RISC techniques in

2592-486: The IBM 7030 ("Stretch") computer, followed by versions for the IBM 7090 , IBM 7094 , and later for the IBM 1401 in 1966. By 1965, FORTRAN IV was supposed to be compliant with the standard being developed by the American Standards Association X3.4.3 FORTRAN Working Group. Between 1966 and 1968, IBM offered several FORTRAN IV compilers for its System/360 , each named by letters that indicated

2664-491: The C library. Another issue is that the score reported does not include information which is critical when comparing systems such as which compiler was used, and what optimizations. Dhrystone remains remarkably resilient as a simple benchmark, but its continuing value in establishing true performance is questionable. It is easy to use, well documented, fully self-contained, well understood, and can be made to work on almost any system. In particular, it has remained in broad use in

2736-493: The CPU to settle after each pulse, and by the extra heat created. After each clock pulse, the signal lines inside the CPU need time to settle to their new state. That is, every signal line must finish transitioning from 0 to 1, or from 1 to 0. If the next clock pulse comes before that, the results will be incorrect. In the process of transitioning, some energy is wasted as heat (mostly inside the driving transistors). When executing complicated instructions that cause many transitions,

2808-549: The Dhrystone score is divided by 1757 (the number of Dhrystones per second obtained on the VAX 11/780 , nominally a 1 MIPS machine). Another way to represent results is in DMIPS/MHz, where DMIPS result is further divided by CPU frequency, to allow for easier comparison of CPUs running at different clock rates . Using Dhrystone as a benchmark has pitfalls: FORTRAN Fortran ( / ˈ f ɔːr t r æ n / ; formerly FORTRAN )

2880-429: The Dhrystone. Most of these, including the small code size and small data set size, were understood at the time of its publication in 1984. More subtle is the slight over-representation of string operations, which is largely language-related: both Ada and Pascal have strings as normal variables in the language, whereas C does not, so what was simple variable assignment in reference benchmarks became buffer copy operations in

2952-508: The Heron program needs several modifications to compile as a Fortran 66 program. Modifications include using the more machine independent versions of the READ and WRITE statements, and removal of the unneeded FLOATF type conversion functions. Though not required, the arithmetic IF statements can be re-written to use logical IF statements and expressions in a more structured fashion. After

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3024-566: The Hollerith edit descriptors in the FORMAT statements with quoted strings. It also uses structured IF and END IF statements, rather than GOTO / CONTINUE . The development of a revised standard to succeed FORTRAN 77 would be repeatedly delayed as the standardization process struggled to keep up with rapid changes in computing and programming practice. In the meantime, as the "Standard FORTRAN" for nearly fifteen years, FORTRAN 77 would become

3096-516: The PA-7100 and AXP 21064 DEC Alpha respectively. In 1995, Intel's P5 Pentium chip ran at 100 MHz (100 million cycles per second). On March 6, 2000, AMD demonstrated passing the 1 GHz milestone a few days ahead of Intel shipping 1 GHz in systems. In 2002, an Intel Pentium 4 model was introduced as the first CPU with a clock rate of 3 GHz (three billion cycles per second corresponding to ~ 0.33 nanoseconds per cycle). Since then,

3168-522: The University of Waterloo's WATFOR and WATFIV were created to simplify the complex compile and link processes of earlier compilers. In the FORTRAN IV programming environment of the era, except for that used on Control Data Corporation (CDC) systems, only one instruction was placed per line. The CDC version allowed for multiple instructions per line if separated by a $ (dollar) character. The FORTRAN sheet

3240-737: The clock rate of production processors has increased more slowly, with performance improvements coming from other design changes. Set in 2011, the Guinness World Record for the highest CPU clock rate is 8.42938 GHz with an overclocked AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer -based chip in an LHe / LN2 cryobath, 5 GHz on air . This is surpassed by the CPU-Z overclocking record for the highest CPU clock rate at 8.79433 GHz with an AMD FX-8350 Piledriver -based chip bathed in LN2 , achieved in November 2012. It

3312-484: The conflict list (see Appendix A2 of X3.9-1978) addressed loopholes or pathological cases permitted by the prior standard but rarely used, a small number of specific capabilities were deliberately removed, such as: A Fortran 77 version of the Heron program requires no modifications to the Fortran 66 version. However this example demonstrates additional cleanup of the I/O statements, including using list-directed I/O, and replacing

3384-404: The crystal with another crystal that oscillates at half the frequency (" underclocking ") will generally make the CPU run at half the performance and reduce waste heat produced by the CPU. Conversely, some people try to increase performance of a CPU by replacing the oscillator crystal with a higher frequency crystal (" overclocking "). However, the amount of overclocking is limited by the time for

3456-551: The decimal point, the .2 in F10.2 of the FORMAT statement with label 601. IBM also developed a FORTRAN III in 1958 that allowed for inline assembly code among other features; however, this version was never released as a product. Like the 704 FORTRAN and FORTRAN II, FORTRAN III included machine-dependent features that made code written in it unportable from machine to machine. Early versions of FORTRAN provided by other vendors suffered from

3528-559: The early history of FORTRAN was the decision by the American Standards Association (now American National Standards Institute (ANSI)) to form a committee sponsored by the Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (BEMA) to develop an American Standard Fortran . The resulting two standards, approved in March 1966, defined two languages, FORTRAN (based on FORTRAN IV, which had served as

3600-580: The embedded computing world, though the recently developed EEMBC benchmark suite, the CoreMark standalone benchmark, HINT, Stream, and even Bytemark are widely quoted and used, as well as more specific benchmarks for the memory subsystem (Cachebench), TCP/IP (TTCP), and many others. Dhrystone may represent a result more meaningfully than MIPS (million instructions per second) because instruction count comparisons between different instruction sets (e.g. RISC vs. CISC ) can confound simple comparisons. For example,

3672-432: The entire card to be treated as a comment and ignored by the compiler. Otherwise, the columns of the card were divided into four fields: Columns 73 to 80 could therefore be used for identification information, such as punching a sequence number or text, which could be used to re-order cards if a stack of cards was dropped; though in practice this was reserved for stable, production programs. An IBM 519 could be used to copy

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3744-501: The generated code, the results of which were used to optimize the placement of basic blocks in memory—a very sophisticated optimization for its time. The Monte Carlo technique is documented in Backus et al.'s paper on this original implementation, The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System : The fundamental unit of program is the basic block ; a basic block is a stretch of program which has one entry point and one exit point. The purpose of section 4

3816-545: The higher the clock rate the more heat produced. Transistors may be damaged by excessive heat. There is also a lower limit of the clock rate, unless a fully static core is used. The first fully mechanical analog computer, the Z1 , operated at 1 Hz (cycle per second) clock frequency and the first electromechanical general purpose computer, the Z3 , operated at a frequency of about 5–10 Hz. The first electronic general purpose computer,

3888-521: The historically most important dialect. An important practical extension to FORTRAN 77 was the release of MIL-STD-1753 in 1978. This specification, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense , standardized a number of features implemented by most FORTRAN 77 compilers but not included in the ANSI FORTRAN 77 standard. These features would eventually be incorporated into the Fortran 90 standard. The IEEE 1003.9 POSIX Standard, released in 1991, provided

3960-451: The increasing popularity of FORTRAN spurred competing computer manufacturers to provide FORTRAN compilers for their machines, so that by 1963 over 40 FORTRAN compilers existed. FORTRAN was provided for the IBM 1401 computer by an innovative 63-phase compiler that ran entirely in its core memory of only 8000 (six-bit) characters. The compiler could be run from tape, or from a 2200-card deck; it used no further tape or disk storage. It kept

4032-526: The language as "Fortran" with initial caps since Fortran 90. In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer . Backus' historic FORTRAN team consisted of programmers Richard Goldberg, Sheldon F. Best, Harlan Herrick, Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt , Robert Nelson, Irving Ziller, Harold Stern, Lois Haibt , and David Sayre . Its concepts included easier entry of equations into

4104-656: The minimum amount of memory the compiler needed to run. The letters (F, G, H) matched the codes used with System/360 model numbers to indicate memory size, each letter increment being a factor of two larger: Digital Equipment Corporation maintained DECSYSTEM-10 Fortran IV (F40) for PDP-10 from 1967 to 1975. Compilers were also available for the UNIVAC 1100 series and the Control Data 6000 series and 7000 series systems. At about this time FORTRAN IV had started to become an important educational tool and implementations such as

4176-465: The need to generate efficient code for Fortran programs. The initial release of FORTRAN for the IBM 704 contained 32 statements , including: The arithmetic IF statement was reminiscent of (but not readily implementable by) a three-way comparison instruction (CAS—Compare Accumulator with Storage) available on the 704. The statement provided the only way to compare numbers—by testing their difference, with an attendant risk of overflow. This deficiency

4248-460: The operations of its components, and is used as an indicator of the processor's speed. It is measured in the SI unit of frequency hertz (Hz). The clock rate of the first generation of computers was measured in hertz or kilohertz (kHz), the first personal computers (PCs) to arrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s had clock rates measured in megahertz (MHz), and in the 21st century the speed of modern CPUs

4320-420: The problem. Later, an error-handling subroutine to handle user errors such as division by zero, developed by NASA, was incorporated, informing users of which line of code contained the error. Before the development of disk files, text editors and terminals, programs were most often entered on a keypunch keyboard onto 80-column punched cards , one line to a card. The resulting deck of cards would be fed into

4392-415: The processor usage of some common set of programs. Whetstone, developed in 1972, originally strove to mimic typical Algol 60 programs based on measurements from 1970, but eventually became most popular in its Fortran version, reflecting the highly numerical orientation of computing in the 1960s. Dhrystone's eventual importance as an indicator of general-purpose ("integer") performance of new computers made it

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4464-519: The program in memory and loaded overlays that gradually transformed it, in place, into executable form, as described by Haines. This article was reprinted, edited, in both editions of Anatomy of a Compiler and in the IBM manual "Fortran Specifications and Operating Procedures, IBM 1401". The executable form was not entirely machine language ; rather, floating-point arithmetic, sub-scripting, input/output, and function references were interpreted, preceding UCSD Pascal P-code by two decades. GOTRAN ,

4536-601: The release of the FORTRAN 66 standard, compiler vendors introduced several extensions to Standard Fortran , prompting ANSI committee X3J3 in 1969 to begin work on revising the 1966 standard, under sponsorship of CBEMA , the Computer Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (formerly BEMA). Final drafts of this revised standard circulated in 1977, leading to formal approval of the new FORTRAN standard in April 1978. The new standard, called FORTRAN 77 and officially denoted X3.9-1978, added

4608-428: The same disadvantage. IBM began development of FORTRAN IV in 1961 as a result of customer demands. FORTRAN IV removed the machine-dependent features of FORTRAN II (such as READ INPUT TAPE ), while adding new features such as a LOGICAL data type , logical Boolean expressions , and the logical IF statement as an alternative to the arithmetic IF statement. FORTRAN IV was eventually released in 1962, first for

4680-467: The same high-level task may require many more instructions on a RISC machine, but might execute faster than a single CISC instruction. Thus, the Dhrystone score counts only the number of program iteration completions per second, allowing individual machines to perform this calculation in a machine-specific way. Another common representation of the Dhrystone benchmark is the DMIPS (Dhrystone MIPS ) obtained when

4752-489: Was a minor revision, mostly to resolve some outstanding issues from the Fortran 90 standard. Nevertheless, Fortran 95 also added a number of extensions, notably from the High Performance Fortran specification: Clock rate In computing , the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses , which are used to synchronize

4824-480: Was also standard-conforming under Fortran 90, and either standard should have been usable to define its behavior. A small set of features were identified as "obsolescent" and were expected to be removed in a future standard. All of the functionalities of these early-version features can be performed by newer Fortran features. Some are kept to simplify porting of old programs but many were deleted in Fortran 95. Fortran 95 , published officially as ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997,

4896-430: Was divided into four fields, as described above. Two compilers of the time, IBM "G" and UNIVAC, allowed comments to be written on the same line as instructions, separated by a special character: "master space": V (perforations 7 and 8) for UNIVAC and perforations 12/11/0/7/8/9 (hexadecimal FF) for IBM. These comments were not to be inserted in the middle of continuation cards. Perhaps the most significant development in

4968-410: Was finally released as ISO/IEC standard 1539:1991 in 1991 and an ANSI Standard in 1992. In addition to changing the official spelling from FORTRAN to Fortran, this major revision added many new features to reflect the significant changes in programming practice that had evolved since the 1978 standard: Unlike the prior revision, Fortran 90 removed no features. Any standard-conforming FORTRAN 77 program

5040-412: Was instead 10101 DO101I = 1.101 , the assignment of 1.101 to a variable called DO101I . Note the slight visual difference between a comma and a period. Hollerith strings , originally allowed only in FORMAT and DATA statements, were prefixed by a character count and the letter H (e.g., 26HTHIS IS ALPHANUMERIC DATA. ), allowing blanks to be retained within the character string. Miscounts were

5112-411: Was later overcome by "logical" facilities introduced in FORTRAN IV. The FREQUENCY statement was used originally (and optionally) to give branch probabilities for the three branch cases of the arithmetic IF statement. It could also be used to suggest how many iterations a DO loop might run. The first FORTRAN compiler used this weighting to perform at compile time a Monte Carlo simulation of

5184-454: Was widely adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs, which encouraged compiler writers to produce compilers that could generate faster and more efficient code. The inclusion of a complex number data type in the language made Fortran especially suited to technical applications such as electrical engineering. By 1960, versions of FORTRAN were available for the IBM 709 , 650 , 1620 , and 7090 computers. Significantly,

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