FORTRAN is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originallydeveloped by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications and it was designed by John W. Backus. FORTRAN came to dominate this area ofprogramming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finiteelement analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry.