For a programming language, Fortran has been around a long time. It was one of the first widely used 鈥渉igh-level鈥?languages, as well as the first programming language to be standardized. It is still the premier language for scientific and engineering computing applications. The purpose of this handbook is to describe the latest version of this language, Fortran 90. This chapter gives some history of the development and standardization of Fortran and describes the notation used to specify the syntax of Fortran 90.
