Editing Fortran (section)

==Science and engineering==
[[File:General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation of black hole accretion.jpg|thumb|General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic Fortran simulation of black hole accretion using the BHAC code with cartesian adaptive mesh]]
[[File:Cylinder flow.gif|thumb|Flow around a cylinder computed in Fortran with OpenCL (University of Bristol, UK)]]
[[File:Velocity and sea surface temperature in the oceans.png|thumb|upright|Velocity and sea surface temperature in the oceans, computed with the NEMO Fortran code (Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean, https://www.nemo-ocean.eu) in the [[Barcelona Supercomputing Center]] (2020)]]

Although a 1968 journal article by the authors of [[BASIC]] already described FORTRAN as "old-fashioned",<ref name="dtss196810">{{cite journal | url=http://dtss.dartmouth.edu/sciencearticle/index.html | title=Dartmouth Time-Sharing |author1=Kemeny, John G. |author2=Kurtz, Thomas E. | journal=Science | date=October 11, 1968 | volume=162 | issue=3850 | pages=223–228| doi=10.1126/science.162.3850.223 | pmid=5675464 | bibcode=1968Sci...162..223K }}</ref> programs have been written in Fortran for many decades and there is a vast body of Fortran software in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities.<ref>{{cite web|last=Phillips|first=Lee|title=Scientific computing's future: Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth?|url=https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/|website=Ars Technica|date=May 8, 2014 |access-date=May 8, 2014}}</ref> [[Jay Pasachoff]] wrote in 1984 that "physics and astronomy students simply have to learn FORTRAN.  So much exists in FORTRAN that it seems unlikely that scientists will change to [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]], [[Modula-2]], or whatever."<ref name="pasachoff198404">{{cite news | url=https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-04/1984_04_BYTE_09-04_Real-World_Interfacing#page/n403/mode/2up | title=Scientists: FORTRAN vs. Modula-2 | work=BYTE | date=April 1984 | access-date=February 6, 2015 | author=Pasachoff, Jay M. | author-link=Jay Pasachoff | pages=404 | type=letter}}</ref> In 1993, [[Cecil E. Leith]] called FORTRAN the "mother tongue of scientific computing", adding that its replacement by any other possible language "may remain a forlorn hope".<ref name="Galperin">{{cite book|last=Galperin|first=Boris|title=Large Eddy Simulation of Complex Engineering and Geophysical Flows|year=1993|publisher=Cambridgey|location=London|isbn=978-0-521-43009-8|page=573|chapter=26}}</ref>

It is the primary language for some of the most intensive [[Supercomputer|super-computing]] tasks, such as in [[astronomy]], [[climate model]]ing, [[computational chemistry]], [[computational economics]], [[computational fluid dynamics]], [[computational physics]], data analysis,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Brandt |first=Siegmund |title=Statistical and Computational Methods in Data Analysis |publisher=North-Holland Publishing Company |date=1970 |isbn=0-7204-2033-4 |pages=Preface }}</ref> [[hydrological modeling]], numerical linear algebra and numerical libraries ([[LAPACK]], [[IMSL Numerical Libraries|IMSL]] and [[NAG Numerical Library|NAG]]), [[optimization]], satellite simulation, [[structural engineering]], and [[numerical weather prediction|weather prediction]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Curcic |first=Milan |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l2IFEAAAQBAJ&dq=%22fortran%22++weather+prediction&pg=PA5 |title=Modern Fortran: Building efficient parallel applications |date=November 24, 2020 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-1-61729-528-7 }}</ref>  Many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors, such as the floating-point components of the [[Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation|SPEC]] benchmarks (e.g., [http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/CFP2006/ CFP2006], [http://www.spec.org/cpu2017/Docs/overview.html#benchmarks CFP2017]) are written in Fortran. Math algorithms are well documented in [[Numerical Recipes]].

Apart from this, more modern codes in computational science generally use large program libraries, such as [[METIS]] for graph partitioning, [[PETSc]] or [[Trilinos]] for linear algebra capabilities, [[deal.II]] or [[FEniCS Project|FEniCS]] for mesh and finite element support, and other generic libraries.  Since the early 2000s, many of the widely used support libraries have also been implemented in [[C (programming language)|C]] and more recently, in [[C++]]. On the other hand, high-level languages such as the [[Wolfram Language]], [[MATLAB]], [[Python (programming language)|Python]], and [[R (programming language)|R]] have become popular in particular areas of computational science. Consequently, a growing fraction of scientific programs are also written in such higher-level scripting languages. For this reason, [[foreign function interface|facilities for inter-operation with C]] were added to Fortran 2003 and enhanced by the ISO/IEC technical specification 29113, which was incorporated into Fortran 2018 to allow more flexible interoperation with other programming languages.