Newswise — The programming language Fortran celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark this occasion, a special issue of Scientific Programming on the role of Fortran in the scientific programming discipline is being published by IOS Press this month. The issue is dedicated to Fortran creator John Backus and Ken Kennedy, pioneer of Fortran compiler optimization and parallelization. Both highly esteemed scientists died this year.
The first issue of the 15th volume of Scientific Programming is entitled 'Fortran programming language and Scientific Programming: 50 years of mutual growth.' Editor-in-Chief Boleslaw Szymanski: "Over half of the century of its existence, the evolving Fortran has been the traditional and major language for scientific programming and it has played a significant role in the research on programming languages and compilers for scientific computing."
The language was designed by John Backus and his colleagues at IBM with the goal to reduce the cost of programming scientific applications by providing an 'automatic programming system' to replace assembly language with a notation closer to the scientific programming domain. Although the first specification of the Fortran language was released in 1956, IBM delivered its first compiler for the computer, IBM model 704, in 1957, hence this year marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of Fortran to users.
© 2007 IOS Press. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use prohibited. "Fortran Programming Language and Scientific Programming: 50 Years of Mutual Growth" is a special issue of the IOS Press journal Scientific Programming (Volume 15, Number 1 (2007)).
Contents:IntroductionFortran programming language and Scientific Programming: 50 Years of mutual growth/ B.K. Szymanski
Scientific programming in Fortran/ W. Van Snyder
Co-arrays in the next Fortran Standard/ J. Reid and R.W. Numrich
The transition and adoption to modern programming concepts for scientific computing in Fortran/ C.D. Norton, V.K. Decyk, B.K. Szymanski and H. Gardner
From FORTRAN 77 to locality-aware high productivity languages for peta-scale computing/ H.P. Zima
Book Review TSP^{SM} Coaching Development Teams (SEI Series in Software Engineering), by Watts S. Humphrey
About Scientific ProgrammingScientific Programming (ISSN: 1058-9244, Editors-in-Chief: Ronald H. Perrott and Boleslaw Szymanski) provides a forum for research results in, and practical experience with, software engineering environments, tools, languages, and models of computation aimed specifically at supporting scientific and engineering computing. Scientific Programming brings together in one place developments that are found in a wide variety of journals, conference proceedings and informal society journals. Scientific Programming publishes papers on language, compiler and programming environment issues for scientific computing. Of particular interest are contributions to programming and software engineering for grid computing, high performance computing, processing very large data sets, supercomputing, visualization, parallel and distributed computing. All languages used in scientific programming, such as Fortran/F90, C/C++, Java and their descendants, as well as scientific programming libraries, such as PVM, MPI, BSP, LogP, Matlab are within the scope of the journal. Scientific Programming celebrates its 15th volume this year. About IOS PressIOS Press (http://www.iospress.nl), celebrating its 20th anniversary, publishes some 85 international journals and approximately 100 book titles a year, ranging from computer sciences and mathematics to medicine and the natural sciences. Commencing its publishing activities in 1987, IOS Press serves a variety of scientific and medical communities in all parts of the world. IOS Press is a rapidly-growing publishing company that embraces new technologies for the dissemination of information. All journals are available online and an online book platform was launched in the first half of 2006. Following its founding, IOS Press established several co-publishing initiatives. Its most recent expansion is the acquisition of Delft University Press at the end of 2005. IOS Press also maintains offices in the Washington, DC area, Berlin and a co-publishing relationship with Ohmsha, Ltd (Tokyo).
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