FORTRAN IV

by Jehosua Friedmann and Philip Greenberg

This new edition of the popular guide to programming with the FORTRAN language leads you in an easy step-by-step sequence from the fundamentals to standard extensions and advanced options and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471077712
• ISBN13: 9780471077718
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Best Seller . . . until Basic hit the market place

__I'm the co-author with the business background. My two other co-authors had academic teaching experience with Fortran and their names appear first in order to market into the academic market place. On the other hand, I learned Fortran from IBM's computer manuals and applied it to everyday data processing on the main-frames of the 1970s. This was the only book of its kind because it integrated Fortran programming into the world of business applications. Fortran was previously noted for its use in scientific or math applications. __With practical experience, I learned how to write and document Fortran code, whereby my coding looked somewhat like Cobol structure, utilized re-usable routines in-line and from libraries, and had extremely fast execution times. These experiences underlay my passion to share the Fortran secrets with the world -- hence Fortran IV.__The publisher did not expect the first edition to sell more than the initial press run of 5,000 copies -- but the first and second editions reached a circulation of 100,000 copies, including a Spanish edition which sold in Mexico and South America. Many colleges across the United States used the book as part of the curriculum. Beginning in 1979, a language written by Bill Gates, was marketed: interactive Basic language, and this caused the schools to make the switch to teaching interactive Basic, and away from compiled Fortran. This was also the beginning of an era where one had little concern about the size and speed of applications because one can always buy more or faster computer hardware to make up for bloated and/or inefficient programming code.__I take responsibility for rewriting the second edition and the its education supplement (which was free from Wiley upon request). The editor, who did not know Fortran at the project's beginning, learned the Fortran language as she edited the manuscript.__In 2003, the book may be an oddity, but it represents an important part of history. I learned Fortran as a means to an end: analyze voter perception for a grad school marketing project. In 1965, to make the program work, I had to design a routine which expanded the computer's actual 20 kilobytes of memory to behave like 1 megabyte of memory -- about 20 lines of code. As a grad student in the business school, before the age of computer curriculums, I had no idea of my discovery's magnitude. I just shared the knowledge with the professionals in the school's computer center, who were limited by the 20k boundary. Today's operating systems now handle the virtual memory chore.-- Alan M. Hoffberg