Fortran and Pascal Paper

Learning Team Project

Language comparison of FORTRAN and Pascal

By: Peter Ryan

Richard Zultak

Brendt Lozen

University Of Phoenix

Dan Cohen

POS370

Programming Concepts

Sep 12th 2007

Abstract

The following is a research paper regarding two programming languages called FORTRAN and Pascal.

Pascal [mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal] was designed primarily as a tool for teaching good programming skills, but - thanks largely to the availability of Borland's inexpensive Pascal compiler for the early IBM PC - it has become popular outside of the classroom. Unlike many languages, Pascal requires a fairly structured approach, which prevents the kinds of indecipherable "spaghetti code" and easily-overlooked mistakes that plague programmers using languages such as Fortran or C. Free and commercial tools are available from various sources for DOS, Windows, Mac, OS/2, AmigaOS, and Unix-like systems. The web site editor BBEdit is written in Pascal.

Fortran ["FORmula TRANslation"] is the oldest language still in general use, dating back to 1957, the year the Space Age began. It excels at the first task computers were called on for: number-crunching. This is the language that literally put a man on the moon, and some of the features it developed in the process of that project (and other less glamorous ones) have yet to be duplicated in other, more "modern" languages.

Table of contents

„« Language history and origin

FORTRAN: pg. 4

Pascal: pg. 6

„« Language generation

FORTRAN: pg. 4

Pascal: pg. 6

„« The language structure

FORTRAN: pg. 4

Pascal: pg. 6

„« Language syntax, reading, writing, conditional decision making, Sub-routines and functions.

FORTRAN: pg. 5

Pascal: pg. 7

„« Describe the languages

FORTRAN: pg. 6

Pascal: pg. 7

„« References: pg. 8

FORTRAN is a programming language developed in the early 1950Ў¦s. The name was produced from two words FORmula TRANslation. This is where the word FORTRAN came from. Over the evolution of FORTRANS versions have been upgraded and enhanced throughout its development. A revision of FOTRAN IV led to FORTRAN 77, there were many different versions, but the latest one is underway called FORTRAN 2008. This new version is much like FORTRAN 2003 with more capabilities and a few corrections incorporated like Co-array and BIT data type. This language was mainly designed for scientists and engineers that use FORTRAN as a big part in their field. For the past thirty years FORTRAN has helped to create bridges, aero plane structures, factory automation controls, storm drainage designs, and analysis of scientific data used by civil engineers today. The main tasks FORTRAN is a part of that are useful today are weather, and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, chemistry, stimulations of long-term solar system dynamics, satellite orbits, and simulation of automobile crashes.

As one of the oldest programming languages, the FORTRAN was developed