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Re:Fortran 2023 by kitd on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @11:28AM (#38381359)
It's been about 30 years since I last wrote FORTRAN (77), but back then it was used in computationally intensive applications because it was (or it felt at least) like working much closer to the bare-metal data and code segments of a process than a 'high-level' language like C. Certainly the compilers produced far fewer lines of assembly/line of source compared to C, pushing the burden of correctness back on the programmer. It was almost like working with an assembly macro language.

I suspect much has changed since though, so its fields of use may just be convention now.

Re:Fortran 2023 by m463 on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @05:55PM (#38386354)
I vaguely remember early fortran code was really close to 1:1 source code -> assembly language. Probably just because that's how low-level compilers were.

I also remember from the era, that a one-line program with a '.' in column 6 would generate 600 lines of errors from the IBM optimizing cobol compiler.