Word: fortran
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...order to make it easier for people to communicate with the machines, scientists have developed programming languages that translate commands into Is and Os. There are more than a dozen software languages, each designed for different kinds of users and applications. The first widely accepted one, FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), was developed in 1956 by a team at IBM. It is used primarily on scientific and mathematical problems. BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), which was written by Dartmouth Professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, is well suited for relatively simple personal-computer programs...
Programming languages available include FORTRAN, BASIC PASCAL, C. ECL, PPL, LISP, AN and MACRO II. Utility programs are available for text editing, document preparation and statistical analysis...
...zero and one, computer scientists have devised a babel of "languages" that translate human wishes into some variation of the computer's two words. BASIC is the language of most desktop personal computers, originally written for Dartmouth students in the mid-1960s; FORTRAN is an earlier attempt used mainly for scientific problems; Logo is designed for children; and Ada is used mainly for military problems...
...Russian cyberneticists are often better logicians than their U.S. counterparts. However, they are oriented toward the oretical problems. At the big Soviet training institutes, students concentrate very little on the standard international computer language for commerce, known as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). Instead, they drill in ALGOL and FORTRAN, the two major scientific languages...
...name and secret password, watches the grey screen come alive with responses, and settles down to work. "I don't usually come in here on Saturday night," he explains, nervous because of the interruption in his work. "But I'm taking a course where you have to know Fortran beforehand, and I'm trying desperately to learn...