The legacy of FORTRAN
Since Fortran has been in use for nearly fifty years, there is a vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, quantum chromodynamics, simulations of long-term solar system dynamics, high-fidelity evolution artificial satellite orbits, and simulation of automobile crash dynamics. Indeed, one finds that even today, half a century later, floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are still written in Fortran (e.g., CFP2000, the floating-point component of the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks) |
