FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslator, the first high-level programming language. FORTRAN was developed by John Backus and colleagues at the IBM Corporation beginning in 1954. The first issue of FORTRAN was in 1957. FORTRAN version 66 was the first programming language to be standardized. This has made the language portable, since the program will run on any computer that has a FORTRAN compiler.

A high-level programming language is one that enables the programmer to write programs that are linked to a certain type of computer. These languages are closer to human language and further removed from machine language.

FORTRAN is a popular programming language for scientists and engineers, because of its faculty in handling numeric data. By 1977, other languages such as Pascal, Ada, Modula, C, and C++ had begun to rival FORTRAN for this science and engineering niche. Then, the release of FORTRAN versions 77 and 90 improved the language's capabilities. The release of FORTRAN 2000 is expected during the year 2002.

A FORTRAN program generally consists of a main program, also called a river, and can include several subprograms, also called procedures or subroutines. A typical program is a sequence of lines of text, which follows a certain structure. As an example, the following is a program concerned with the derivation of the area of a circle:

• c This program reads a real number r and prints
• c the area of a circle with radius r
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