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What is Fortran?

Fortran is 3'rd generation statically typed high performance programming language that is focusing on performance. It is one of the oldest language that is in use today. Fortran design was started by John Backus in 1940s and is powering the world since 1956.

Fortran standard

Fortran is an ISO standard language. The latest revision of the language is Fortran 2018. The next revision, is planned for release in 2023. A standard library and a package manager are currently work in progress and active as open source projects.

Video Lecture

Fortran is available as one of GNU compilers. You can watch an introduction to Fortran 95 in this beautiful video tutorial on YouTube by Darek Banas. A single video containing an entire book. Give it a try before reading the text articles and then take the quiz.

Fortran Video

▶ Introduction to Fortran

High level evaluation

Fortran is a solid language implemented by various organizations for specific microprocesors. Each compiler has particular extended features but most compilers support a common standard. Intel is making two comercial compilers: C and Fortran. Nvidia also makes an optimized Fortran compiler. To evaluate Fortran features we are using GNU GCC, that is a powerful, open source compiler.

What is wrong with it?

Fortran is not for beginners. It is too verbose and has a strange syntax. Fortran does not have native support for Unicode strings. Fortran compilers are fast but sometimes the compiler error messages are nowere close to the real failures. Therefore it is harder to learn. However Fortran is yet alive and maintained language.

Learning Fortran

Read next articles to learn Fortran. You can contribute if you are Sage-Code developer with Fortran skills. Join Discord and talk to us about Fortran. We need volunteers. You can learn Fortran and contribute to our website in the same time.

Text articles

Fortran Quiz

Next quiz will demonstrate your ability to write and understand Fortran code. This is a self assesment prep quiz not an exam. It has 100 questions for beginners. You can scan the code using a mobile or tablet or click the link to start. It requires you to sign-in using your Google account.
Fotran Quiz QR

Fortran - Quiz
Privacy Terms: We do not collect e-mail addresses but we record your name with the test results on Google drive. If you take more than 80% we will recognize your skill and will endorse you on Linked-in. If you don't agree, you can use name: Anonymous or a fake name but then we can't endorse your new skills.

External Resources

Our tutorial do not cover all aspect of Fortran programming. For deep learning you can use external links or books. We are reffering here only resources that have no ads and are safer to use. We use these resources ourselves to learn Fortran and update our tutorial.

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