Re:The Array Cast – A podcast about the array programming la...
by Bostonian on Thursday May 20, 2021 @01:05PM
(#27223864)
Fortran has had built-in array operations since the Fortran 90 standard. If X and Y are scalars or arrays of the same shape, you can X+Y, X*Y, exp(X), sin(X) etc. You can define your own elemental functions that act on both scalars and arrays of any rank. I still write loops when programming in Fortran 95 but less often than in Fortran 77. So I think modern Fortran is an array language.
Maybe grandparent meant it has the same _application_ as array languages, in that its only surviving kingdom is scientific computing where devouring gargantuan arrays of numerics is the only thing that matters, unlike C or C++ that are much more widely used. Maybe that's why it has a long history of being parallized with various tools and runtimes _despite_ its inherent imperativeness. (I don't remember where I heard this, but somebody wrote an analyzer to analyze some Fortran programmes in the 90s and found that over 80%/90% of Fortran programmes are spent doing variations of map, filter and reduce. So it's an extremely imperative language against its intended use. Maybe I will post a link in an edit when I find the source of the claim)