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WHAT IS FORTRAN?
Fortran is a programming language first created in the 1950s. It is still in use today. It is a procedural language mainly used for scientific computing and numerical analysis.
Fortran is rarely used today in industry — one ranking ranks it behind 29 other languages
FOUNDATION OF FORTRAN:
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax.
He joined IBM in 1950. During his first three years, he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. In 1953 Backus developed the language Speedcoding.
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The speedcoding system was an interpreter and focused on ease of use at the expense of system resources. It provided pseudo-instructions for common mathematical functions: logarithms, exponentiation, and trigonometric operations.
Although it substantially reduced the effort of writing many jobs, the running time of a program that was written with the help of Speedcoding was usually ten to twenty times that of machine code. The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701 ,the first high-level language created for an IBM computer, to aid in software development for the IBM 701 computer.
Programming was very difficult at this time, and in 1954 Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high-level programming language to be put to broad use.
WHAT IS BNF?
BNF stands for Backus-Naur Form. It is used to write a formal representation of a context-free grammar. It is also used to describe the syntax of a programming language.
BNF (Backus–Naur Form) is a syntactic metalanguage (i.e., a language about a language). The metalanguage is a formal notation for specifying the grammar that describes the syntax of a programming language.
FOUNDATION OF BNF:
Backus served on the international committees that developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the de facto worldwide standard for publishing algorithms. Backus developed the Backus–Naur form (BNF), published in the UNESCO report on ALGOL 58. It was a formal notation able to describe any context-free programming language, and was important in the development of compilers.
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FUNCTION -LEVEL PROGRAMMING :
Backus later worked on a function-level programming language known as FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?".
Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from "Function Level"), a successor to FP. FL was an internal IBM research project, and development of the language stopped when the project was finished
John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
He retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.
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