Fortran is the oldest high level languages. It was developed at IBM between 1954 and 1957 by a team lead by John Backus (well known for the Backus normal form, BNF, for syntax definitions). As its name (FORmula TRANslator) indicates, the language is designed for numerical computations. The first ANS standard was defined in 1966 (Fortran66), a major update came out in 1977 (Fortran77), and the latest official standard is Fortran90.
This chapter is based on Fortran77 which is probably the version with the largest code base to date. In some place, I will hint at some of the improvements contained in the Fortran90 standard.
I am using GNU's Fortran compiler f77 on a Linux system for the examples. To test a program, call f77 followed by the name of the source file and run the resulting executable a.out (as usual you can also store the executable in another file using the -o option).
[PAGE95]> is nice, compact introduction to Fortran77 which is available for free on the Internet (the book is out of print).