Programming languages

Computers currently need precise instructions as to the tasks that are to be executed. Though it is a goal of artificial intelligence research to use natural language, the day when this is a reality is still far away. Aspects of the languages commonly used in scientific computation are presented here.

Fortran

Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) was introduced in the 1960's to avoid the chore of directly using machine binary instructions.

Fortran 90

Fortran 90 has been intriduced in the 1990's to alleviate some of the shortcomings of Fortran.

C

A language developed at Bell Research Labs, initially for building operating systems. It has a small core and allows direct access to most machine features.

C++

A radical extension of C that introduces object oriented programming.

Python

A scripting language useful for control of computational chores.