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Fortran

Fortran (formerly FORTRAN) is a third generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM. It first compiled correctly in 1958. Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran to limit proliferation of compilers using slightly different syntax. Successive versions have added support for a character data type (Fortran 77), structured programming, array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).

Since April 2024, Fortran has ranked among the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.

Naming
The first manual for FORTRAN describes it as a Formula Translating System, and printed the name with small caps,. Other sources suggest the name stands for Formula Translator, or Formula Translation.

Early IBM computers did not support lowercase letters, and the names of versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were usually spelled in all-uppercase. FORTRAN 77 was the last version in which the Fortran character set included only uppercase letters.

The official language standards for Fortran have referred to the language as "Fortran" with initial caps since Fortran 90.

Origins

In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer. Backus' historic FORTRAN team consisted of programmers Richard Goldberg, Sheldon F. Best, Harlan Herrick, Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt, Robert Nelson, Irving Ziller, Harold Stern, Lois Haibt, and David Sayre. Its concepts included easier entry of equations into a computer, an idea developed by J. Halcombe Laning and demonstrated in the Laning and Zierler system of 1952.

A draft specification for The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by November 1954. The first manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956,  with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. Fortran produced efficient enough code for assembly language programmers to accept a high-level programming language replacement.

John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

The language was widely adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs, which encouraged compiler writers to produce compilers that could generate faster and more efficient code. The inclusion of a complex number data type in the language made Fortran especially suited to technical applications such as electrical engineering.

By 1960, versions of FORTRAN were available for the IBM 709, 650, 1620, and 7090 computers. Significantly, the increasing popularity of FORTRAN spurred competing computer manufacturers to provide FORTRAN compilers for their machines, so that by 1963 over 40 FORTRAN compilers existed.

FORTRAN was provided for the IBM 1401 computer by an innovative 63-phase compiler that ran entirely in its core memory of only 8000 (six-bit) characters. The compiler could be run from tape, or from a 2200-card deck; it used no further tape or disk storage. It kept the program in memory and loaded overlays that gradually transformed it, in place, into executable form, as described by Haines. This article was reprinted, edited, in both editions of Anatomy of a Compiler and in the IBM manual "Fortran Specifications and Operating Procedures, IBM 1401". The executable form was not entirely machine language; rather, floating-point arithmetic, sub-scripting, input/output, and function references were interpreted, preceding UCSD Pascal P-code by two decades. GOTRAN, a simplified, interpreted version of FORTRAN I (with only 12 statements not 32) for "load and go" operation was available (at least for the early IBM 1620 computer). Modern Fortran, and almost all later versions, are fully compiled, as done for other high-performance languages.

The development of Fortran paralleled the early evolution of compiler technology, and many advances in the theory and design of compilers were specifically motivated by the need to generate efficient code for Fortran programs.

FORTRAN
The initial release of FORTRAN for the IBM 704 contained 32 statements, including:
 * DIMENSION and EQUIVALENCE statements
 * Assignment statements
 * Three-way arithmetic IF statement, which passed control to one of three locations in the program depending on whether the result of the arithmetic expression was negative, zero, or positive
 * Control statements for checking exceptions (IF ACCUMULATOR OVERFLOW, IF QUOTIENT OVERFLOW, and IF DIVIDE CHECK); and control statements for manipulating sense switches and sense lights (IF (SENSE SWITCH), IF (SENSE LIGHT), and SENSE LIGHT)
 * GO TO, computed GO TO, ASSIGN, and assigned GO TO
 * DO loops
 * Formatted I/O: FORMAT, READ, READ INPUT TAPE, WRITE OUTPUT TAPE, PRINT, and PUNCH
 * Unformatted I/O: READ TAPE, READ DRUM, WRITE TAPE, and WRITE DRUM
 * Other I/O: END FILE, REWIND, and BACKSPACE
 * PAUSE, STOP, and CONTINUE
 * FREQUENCY statement (for providing optimization hints to the compiler).

The arithmetic IF statement was reminiscent of (but not readily implementable by) a three-way comparison instruction (CAS—Compare Accumulator with Storage) available on the 704. The statement provided the only way to compare numbers—by testing their difference, with an attendant risk of overflow. This deficiency was later overcome by "logical" facilities introduced in FORTRAN IV.

The FREQUENCY statement was used originally (and optionally) to give branch probabilities for the three branch cases of the arithmetic IF statement. The first FORTRAN compiler used this weighting to perform at compile time a Monte Carlo simulation of the generated code, the results of which were used to optimize the placement of basic blocks in memory—a very sophisticated optimization for its time. The Monte Carlo technique is documented in Backus et al.'s paper on this original implementation, The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System:

"The fundamental unit of program is the basic block; a basic block is a stretch of program which has one entry point and one exit point. The purpose of section 4 is to prepare for section 5 a table of predecessors (PRED table) which enumerates the basic blocks and lists for every basic block each of the basic blocks which can be its immediate predecessor in flow, together with the absolute frequency of each such basic block link. This table is obtained by running the program once in Monte-Carlo fashion, in which the outcome of conditional transfers arising out of IF-type statements and computed GO TO's is determined by a random number generator suitably weighted according to whatever FREQUENCY statements have been provided."

The first FORTRAN compiler reported diagnostic information by halting the program when an error was found and outputting an error code on its console. That code could be looked up by the programmer in an error messages table in the operator's manual, providing them with a brief description of the problem. Later, an error-handling subroutine to handle user errors such as division by zero, developed by NASA, was incorporated, informing users of which line of code contained the error.

Fixed layout and punched cards

Before the development of disk files, text editors and terminals, programs were most often entered on a keypunch keyboard onto 80-column punched cards, one line to a card. The resulting deck of cards would be fed into a card reader to be compiled. Punched card codes included no lower-case letters or many special characters, and special versions of the IBM 026 keypunch were offered that would correctly print the re-purposed special characters used in FORTRAN.

Reflecting punched card input practice, Fortran programs were originally written in a fixed-column format, with the first 72 columns read into twelve 36-bit words.

A letter "C" in column 1 caused the entire card to be treated as a comment and ignored by the compiler. Otherwise, the columns of the card were divided into four fields:
 * 1 to 5 were the label field: a sequence of digits here was taken as a label for use in DO or control statements such as GO TO and IF, or to identify a FORMAT statement referred to in a WRITE or READ statement. Leading zeros are ignored and 0 is not a valid label number.
 * 6 was a continuation field: a character other than a blank or a zero here caused the card to be taken as a continuation of the statement on the prior card. The continuation cards were usually numbered 1, 2, etc. and the starting card might therefore have zero in its continuation column—which is not a continuation of its preceding card.
 * 7 to 72 served as the statement field.
 * 73 to 80 were ignored (the IBM 704's card reader only used 72 columns).

Columns 73 to 80 could therefore be used for identification information, such as punching a sequence number or text, which could be used to re-order cards if a stack of cards was dropped; though in practice this was reserved for stable, production programs. An IBM 519 could be used to copy a program deck and add sequence numbers. Some early compilers, e.g., the IBM 650's, had additional restrictions due to limitations on their card readers. Keypunches could be programmed to tab to column 7 and skip out after column 72. Later compilers relaxed most fixed-format restrictions, and the requirement was eliminated in the Fortran 90 standard.

Within the statement field, whitespace characters (blanks) were ignored outside a text literal. This allowed omitting spaces between tokens for brevity or including spaces within identifiers for clarity. For example, AVG OF X was a valid identifier, equivalent to AVGOFX, and  was a valid statement, equivalent to   because the zero in column 6 is treated as if it were a space (!), while   was instead , the assignment of 1.101 to a variable called. Note the slight visual difference between a comma and a period.

Hollerith strings, originally allowed only in FORMAT and DATA statements, were prefixed by a character count and the letter H (e.g., 26HTHIS IS ALPHANUMERIC DATA.), allowing blanks to be retained within the character string. Miscounts were a problem.

FORTRAN II
IBM's FORTRAN II appeared in 1958. The main enhancement was to support procedural programming by allowing user-written subroutines and functions which returned values with parameters passed by reference. The COMMON statement provided a way for subroutines to access common (or global) variables. Six new statements were introduced:
 * SUBROUTINE, FUNCTION, and END
 * CALL and RETURN
 * COMMON

Over the next few years, FORTRAN II added support for the DOUBLE PRECISION and COMPLEX data types.

Early FORTRAN compilers supported no recursion in subroutines. Early computer architectures supported no concept of a stack, and when they did directly support subroutine calls, the return location was often stored in one fixed location adjacent to the subroutine code (e.g. the IBM 1130) or a specific machine register (IBM 360 et seq), which only allows recursion if a stack is maintained by software and the return address is stored on the stack before the call is made and restored after the call returns. Although not specified in FORTRAN 77, many F77 compilers supported recursion as an option, and the Burroughs mainframes, designed with recursion built-in, did so by default. It became a standard in Fortran 90 via the new keyword RECURSIVE.

Simple FORTRAN II program
This program, for Heron's formula, reads data on a tape reel containing three 5-digit integers A, B, and C as input. There are no "type" declarations available: variables whose name starts with I, J, K, L, M, or N are "fixed-point" (i.e. integers), otherwise floating-point. Since integers are to be processed in this example, the names of the variables start with the letter "I". The name of a variable must start with a letter and can continue with both letters and digits, up to a limit of six characters in FORTRAN II. If A, B, and C cannot represent the sides of a triangle in plane geometry, then the program's execution will end with an error code of "STOP 1". Otherwise, an output line will be printed showing the input values for A, B, and C, followed by the computed AREA of the triangle as a floating-point number occupying ten spaces along the line of output and showing 2 digits after the decimal point, the .2 in F10.2 of the FORMAT statement with label 601.

FORTRAN III
IBM also developed a FORTRAN III in 1958 that allowed for inline assembly code among other features; however, this version was never released as a product. Like the 704 FORTRAN and FORTRAN II, FORTRAN III included machine-dependent features that made code written in it unportable from machine to machine. Early versions of FORTRAN provided by other vendors suffered from the same disadvantage.

FORTRAN IV
IBM began development of FORTRAN IV starting in 1961, as a result of customer demands. FORTRAN IV removed the machine-dependent features of FORTRAN II (such as READ INPUT TAPE), while adding new features such as a LOGICAL data type, logical Boolean expressions and the logical IF statement as an alternative to the arithmetic IF statement. FORTRAN IV was eventually released in 1962, first for the IBM 7030 ("Stretch") computer, followed by versions for the IBM 7090, IBM 7094, and later for the IBM 1401 in 1966.

By 1965, FORTRAN IV was supposed to be compliant with the standard being developed by the American Standards Association X3.4.3 FORTRAN Working Group.

Between 1966 and 1968, IBM offered several FORTRAN IV compilers for its System/360, each named by letters that indicated the minimum amount of memory the compiler needed to run. The letters (F, G, H) matched the codes used with System/360 model numbers to indicate memory size, each letter increment being a factor of two larger:
 * 1966 : FORTRAN IV F for DOS/360 (64K bytes)
 * 1966 : FORTRAN IV G for OS/360 (128K bytes)
 * 1968 : FORTRAN IV H for OS/360 (256K bytes)

Digital Equipment Corporation maintained DECSYSTEM-10 Fortran IV (F40) for PDP-10 from 1967 to 1975. Compilers were also available for the UNIVAC 1100 series and the Control Data 6000 series and 7000 series systems.

At about this time FORTRAN IV had started to become an important educational tool and implementations such as the University of Waterloo's WATFOR and WATFIV were created to simplify the complex compile and link processes of earlier compilers.

In the FORTRAN IV programming environment of the era, except for that used on Control Data Corporation (CDC) systems, only one instruction was placed per line. The CDC version allowed for multiple instructions per line if separated by a $ (dollar) character. The FORTRAN sheet was divided into four fields, as described above.

Two compilers of the time, IBM "G" and UNIVAC, allowed comments to be written on the same line as instructions, separated by a special character: "master space": V (perforations 7 and 8) for UNIVAC and perforations 12/11/0/7/8/9 (hexadecimal FF) for IBM. These comments were not to be inserted in the middle of continuation cards.

FORTRAN 66
Perhaps the most significant development in the early history of FORTRAN was the decision by the American Standards Association (now American National Standards Institute (ANSI)) to form a committee sponsored by the Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (BEMA) to develop an American Standard Fortran. The resulting two standards, approved in March 1966, defined two languages, FORTRAN (based on FORTRAN IV, which had served as a de facto standard), and Basic FORTRAN (based on FORTRAN II, but stripped of its machine-dependent features). The FORTRAN defined by the first standard, officially denoted X3.9-1966, became known as FORTRAN 66 (although many continued to term it FORTRAN IV, the language on which the standard was largely based). FORTRAN 66 effectively became the first industry-standard version of FORTRAN. FORTRAN 66 included:
 * Main program, SUBROUTINE, FUNCTION, and BLOCK DATA program units
 * INTEGER, REAL, DOUBLE PRECISION, COMPLEX, and LOGICAL data types
 * COMMON, DIMENSION, and EQUIVALENCE statements
 * DATA statement for specifying initial values
 * Intrinsic and EXTERNAL (e.g., library) functions
 * Assignment statement
 * GO TO, computed GO TO, assigned GO TO, and ASSIGN statements
 * Logical IF and arithmetic (three-way) IF statements
 * DO loop statement
 * READ, WRITE, BACKSPACE, REWIND, and ENDFILE statements for sequential I/O
 * FORMAT statement and assigned format
 * CALL, RETURN, PAUSE, and STOP statements
 * Hollerith constants in DATA and FORMAT statements, and as arguments to procedures
 * Identifiers of up to six characters in length
 * Comment lines
 * END line

FORTRAN 77

After the release of the FORTRAN 66 standard, compiler vendors introduced several extensions to Standard Fortran, prompting ANSI committee X3J3 in 1969 to begin work on revising the 1966 standard, under sponsorship of CBEMA, the Computer Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (formerly BEMA). Final drafts of this revised standard circulated in 1977, leading to formal approval of the new FORTRAN standard in April 1978. The new standard, called FORTRAN 77 and officially denoted X3.9-1978, added a number of significant features to address many of the shortcomings of FORTRAN 66:

 * Block IF and END IF statements, with optional ELSE IF and ELSE clauses, to provide improved language support for structured programming
 * DO loop extensions, including parameter expressions, negative increments, and zero trip counts
 * OPEN, CLOSE, and INQUIRE statements for improved I/O capability
 * Direct-access file I/O
 * IMPLICIT statement, to override implicit conventions that undeclared variables are INTEGER if their name begins with I, J, K, L, M, or N (and REAL otherwise)
 * CHARACTER data type, replacing Hollerith strings with vastly expanded facilities for character input and output and processing of character-based data
 * PARAMETER statement for specifying constants
 * SAVE statement for persistent local variables
 * Generic names for intrinsic functions (e.g. SQRT also accepts arguments of other types, such as COMPLEX or REAL*16).
 * A set of intrinsics (LGE, LGT, LLE, LLT) for lexical comparison of strings, based upon the ASCII collating sequence. (These ASCII functions were demanded by the U.S. Department of Defense, in their conditional approval vote.)
 * A maximum of seven dimensions in arrays, rather than three. Allowed subscript expressions were also generalized.

In this revision of the standard, a number of features were removed or altered in a manner that might invalidate formerly standard-conforming programs. (Removal was the only allowable alternative to X3J3 at that time, since the concept of "deprecation" was not yet available for ANSI standards.) While most of the 24 items in the conflict list (see Appendix A2 of X3.9-1978) addressed loopholes or pathological cases permitted by the prior standard but rarely used, a small number of specific capabilities were deliberately removed, such as:

 * Hollerith constants and Hollerith data, such as
 * Reading into an H edit (Hollerith field) descriptor in a FORMAT specification
 * Overindexing of array bounds by subscripts
 * Transfer of control out of and back into the range of a DO loop (also known as "Extended Range")

Transition to ANSI Standard Fortran
The development of a revised standard to succeed FORTRAN 77 would be repeatedly delayed as the standardization process struggled to keep up with rapid changes in computing and programming practice. In the meantime, as the "Standard FORTRAN" for nearly fifteen years, FORTRAN 77 would become the historically most important dialect.

An important practical extension to FORTRAN 77 was the release of MIL-STD-1753 in 1978. This specification, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, standardized a number of features implemented by most FORTRAN 77 compilers but not included in the ANSI FORTRAN 77 standard. These features would eventually be incorporated into the Fortran 90 standard.

 * DO WHILE and END DO statements
 * INCLUDE statement
 * IMPLICIT NONE variant of the IMPLICIT statement
 * Bit manipulation intrinsic functions, based on similar functions included in Industrial Real-Time Fortran (ANSI/ISA S61.1 (1976))

The IEEE 1003.9 POSIX Standard, released in 1991, provided a simple means for FORTRAN 77 programmers to issue POSIX system calls. Over 100 calls were defined in the document – allowing access to POSIX-compatible process control, signal handling, file system control, device control, procedure pointing, and stream I/O in a portable manner.

Fortran 90
The much-delayed successor to FORTRAN 77, informally known as Fortran 90 (and prior to that, Fortran 8X), was finally released as ISO/IEC standard 1539:1991 in 1991 and an ANSI Standard in 1992. In addition to changing the official spelling from FORTRAN to Fortran, this major revision added many new features to reflect the significant changes in programming practice that had evolved since the 1978 standard:

 * Free-form source input removed the need to skip the first six character positions before entering statements.
 * Lowercase Fortran keywords
 * Identifiers up to 31 characters in length (In the previous standard, it was only six characters).
 * Inline comments
 * Ability to operate on arrays (or array sections) as a whole, thus greatly simplifying math and engineering computations.
 * whole, partial and masked array assignment statements and array expressions, such as
 * WHERE statement for selective array assignment
 * array-valued constants and expressions,
 * user-defined array-valued functions and array constructors.
 * RECURSIVE procedures
 * Modules, to group related procedures and data together, and make them available to other program units, including the capability to limit the accessibility to only specific parts of the module.
 * A vastly improved argument-passing mechanism, allowing interfaces to be checked at compile time
 * User-written interfaces for generic procedures
 * Operator overloading
 * Derived (structured) data types
 * New data type declaration syntax, to specify the data type and other attributes of variables
 * Dynamic memory allocation by means of the ALLOCATABLE attribute and the ALLOCATE and DEALLOCATE statements
 * POINTER attribute, pointer assignment, and NULLIFY statement to facilitate the creation and manipulation of dynamic data structures
 * Structured looping constructs, with an END DO statement for loop termination, and EXIT and CYCLE statements for terminating normal DO loop iterations in an orderly way
 * SELECT CASE, CASE, . . . CASE DEFAULT, END SELECT construct for multi-way selection
 * Portable specification of numerical precision under the user's control
 * New and enhanced intrinsic procedures.

Obsolescence and deletions
Unlike the prior revision, Fortran 90 removed no features. Any standard-conforming FORTRAN 77 program was also standard-conforming under Fortran 90, and either standard should have been usable to define its behavior.

A small set of features were identified as "obsolescent" and were expected to be removed in a future standard. All of the functionalities of these early-version features can be performed by newer Fortran features. Some are kept to simplify porting of old programs but many were deleted in Fortran 95.

Fortran 95
Fortran 95, published officially as ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997, was a minor revision, mostly to resolve some outstanding issues from the Fortran 90 standard. Nevertheless, Fortran 95 also added a number of extensions, notably from the High Performance Fortran specification:

 * FORALL and nested WHERE constructs to aid vectorization
 * User-defined PURE and ELEMENTAL procedures
 * Default initialization of derived type components, including pointer initialization
 * Expanded the ability to use initialization expressions for data objects
 * Initialization of pointers to NULL
 * Clearly defined that ALLOCATABLE arrays are automatically deallocated when they go out of scope.

A number of intrinsic functions were extended (for example a dim argument was added to the maxloc intrinsic).

Several features noted in Fortran 90 to be "obsolescent" were removed from Fortran 95:

 * DO statements using REAL and DOUBLE PRECISION index variables
 * Branching to an END IF statement from outside its block
 * PAUSE statement
 * ASSIGN and assigned GO TO statement, and assigned format specifiers
 * H Hollerith edit descriptor.

An important supplement to Fortran 95 was the ISO technical report TR-15581: Enhanced Data Type Facilities, informally known as the Allocatable TR. This specification defined enhanced use of ALLOCATABLE arrays, prior to the availability of fully Fortran 2003-compliant Fortran compilers. Such uses include ALLOCATABLE arrays as derived type components, in procedure dummy argument lists, and as function return values. (ALLOCATABLE arrays are preferable to POINTER-based arrays because ALLOCATABLE arrays are guaranteed by Fortran 95 to be deallocated automatically when they go out of scope, eliminating the possibility of memory leakage. In addition, elements of allocatable arrays are contiguous, and aliasing is not an issue for optimization of array references, allowing compilers to generate faster code than in the case of pointers. )

Another important supplement to Fortran 95 was the ISO technical report TR-15580: Floating-point exception handling, informally known as the IEEE TR. This specification defined support for IEEE floating-point arithmetic and floating-point exception handling.

Conditional compilation and varying length strings
In addition to the mandatory "Base language" (defined in ISO/IEC 1539-1 : 1997), the Fortran 95 language also included two optional modules: which, together, compose the multi-part International Standard (ISO/IEC 1539).
 * Varying length character strings (ISO/IEC 1539-2 : 2000)
 * Conditional compilation (ISO/IEC 1539-3 : 1998)

According to the standards developers, "the optional parts describe self-contained features which have been requested by a substantial body of users and/or implementors, but which are not deemed to be of sufficient generality for them to be required in all standard-conforming Fortran compilers." Nevertheless, if a standard-conforming Fortran does provide such options, then they "must be provided in accordance with the description of those facilities in the appropriate Part of the Standard".

Modern Fortran
The language defined by the twenty-first century standards, in particular because of its incorporation of object-oriented programming support and subsequently Coarray Fortran, is often referred to as 'Modern Fortran', and the term is increasingly used in the literature.

Fortran 2003
Fortran 2003, officially published as ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004, was a major revision introducing many new features. A comprehensive summary of the new features of Fortran 2003 is available at the Fortran Working Group (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5) official Web site.

From that article, the major enhancements for this revision include:
 * Derived type enhancements: parameterized derived types, improved control of accessibility, improved structure constructors, and finalizers
 * Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures, providing complete support for abstract data types
 * Data manipulation enhancements: allocatable components (incorporating TR 15581), deferred type parameters, VOLATILE attribute, explicit type specification in array constructors and allocate statements, pointer enhancements, extended initialization expressions, and enhanced intrinsic procedures
 * Input/output enhancements: asynchronous transfer, stream access, user specified transfer operations for derived types, user specified control of rounding during format conversions, named constants for preconnected units, the FLUSH statement, regularization of keywords, and access to error messages
 * Procedure pointers
 * Support for IEEE floating-point arithmetic and floating-point exception handling (incorporating TR 15580)
 * Interoperability with the C programming language
 * Support for international usage: access to ISO 10646 4-byte characters and choice of decimal or comma in numeric formatted input/output
 * Enhanced integration with the host operating system: access to command-line arguments, environment variables, and processor error messages

An important supplement to Fortran 2003 was the ISO technical report TR-19767: Enhanced module facilities in Fortran. This report provided sub-modules, which make Fortran modules more similar to Modula-2 modules. They are similar to Ada private child sub-units. This allows the specification and implementation of a module to be expressed in separate program units, which improves packaging of large libraries, allows preservation of trade secrets while publishing definitive interfaces, and prevents compilation cascades.

Fortran 2008
ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010, informally known as Fortran 2008, was approved in September 2010. As with Fortran 95, this is a minor upgrade, incorporating clarifications and corrections to Fortran 2003, as well as introducing some new capabilities. The new capabilities include:

 * Sub-modules – additional structuring facilities for modules; supersedes ISO/IEC TR 19767:2005
 * Coarray Fortran – a parallel execution model
 * The DO CONCURRENT construct – for loop iterations with no interdependencies
 * The CONTIGUOUS attribute – to specify storage layout restrictions
 * The BLOCK construct – can contain declarations of objects with construct scope
 * Recursive allocatable components – as an alternative to recursive pointers in derived types

The Final Draft international Standard (FDIS) is available as document N1830.

A supplement to Fortran 2008 is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Specification (TS) 29113 on Further Interoperability of Fortran with C, which has been submitted to ISO in May 2012 for approval. The specification adds support for accessing the array descriptor from C and allows ignoring the type and rank of arguments.

Fortran 2018
The latest revision of the language (Fortran 2018) was earlier referred to as Fortran 2015. It was a significant revision and was released on November 28, 2018.

Fortran 2018 incorporates two previously published Technical Specifications:

 * ISO/IEC TS 29113:2012 Further Interoperability with C
 * ISO/IEC TS 18508:2015 Additional Parallel Features in Fortran

Additional changes and new features include support for ISO/IEC/IEEE 60559:2011 (the version of the IEEE floating-point standard before the latest minor revision IEEE 754–2019), hexadecimal input/output, IMPLICIT NONE enhancements and other changes.

Fortran 2018 deleted the arithmetic IF statement. It also deleted non-block DO constructs - loops which do not end with an END DO or CONTINUE statement. These had been an obsolescent part of the language since Fortran 90.

New obsolescences are: COMMON and EQUIVALENCE statements and the BLOCK DATA program unit, labelled DO loops, specific names for intrinsic functions, and the FORALL statement and construct.

Fortran 2023
Fortran 2023 (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2023) was published in November 2023, and can be purchased from the ISO. Fortran 2023 is a minor extension of Fortran 2018 that focuses on correcting errors and omissions in Fortran 2018. It also adds some small features, including an enumerated type capability.

Language features
A full description of the Fortran language features brought by Fortran 95 is covered in the related article, Fortran 95 language features. The language versions defined by later standards are often referred to collectively as 'Modern Fortran' and are described in the literature.

Science and engineering

Although a 1968 journal article by the authors of BASIC already described FORTRAN as "old-fashioned", programs have been written in Fortran for many decades and there is a vast body of Fortran software in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. Jay Pasachoff wrote in 1984 that "physics and astronomy students simply have to learn FORTRAN. So much exists in FORTRAN that it seems unlikely that scientists will change to Pascal, Modula-2, or whatever." In 1993, Cecil E. Leith called FORTRAN the "mother tongue of scientific computing", adding that its replacement by any other possible language "may remain a forlorn hope".

It is the primary language for some of the most intensive super-computing tasks, such as in astronomy, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, data analysis, hydrological modeling, numerical linear algebra and numerical libraries (LAPACK, IMSL and NAG), optimization, satellite simulation, structural engineering, and weather prediction. Many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors, such as the floating-point components of the SPEC benchmarks (e.g., CFP2006, CFP2017) are written in Fortran. Math algorithms are well documented in Numerical Recipes.

Apart from this, more modern codes in computational science generally use large program libraries, such as METIS for graph partitioning, PETSc or Trilinos for linear algebra capabilities, deal.II or FEniCS for mesh and finite element support, and other generic libraries. Since the early 2000s, many of the widely used support libraries have also been implemented in C and more recently, in C++. On the other hand, high-level languages such as the Wolfram Language, MATLAB, Python, and R have become popular in particular areas of computational science. Consequently, a growing fraction of scientific programs are also written in such higher-level scripting languages. For this reason, facilities for inter-operation with C were added to Fortran 2003 and enhanced by the ISO/IEC technical specification 29113, which was incorporated into Fortran 2018 to allow more flexible interoperation with other programming languages.

Portability
Portability was a problem in the early days because there was no agreed upon standard—not even IBM's reference manual—and computer companies vied to differentiate their offerings from others by providing incompatible features. Standards have improved portability. The 1966 standard provided a reference syntax and semantics, but vendors continued to provide incompatible extensions. Although careful programmers were coming to realize that use of incompatible extensions caused expensive portability problems, and were therefore using programs such as The PFORT Verifier, it was not until after the 1977 standard, when the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) published FIPS PUB 69, that processors purchased by the U.S. Government were required to diagnose extensions of the standard. Rather than offer two processors, essentially every compiler eventually had at least an option to diagnose extensions.

Incompatible extensions were not the only portability problem. For numerical calculations, it is important to take account of the characteristics of the arithmetic. This was addressed by Fox et al. in the context of the 1966 standard by the PORT library. The ideas therein became widely used, and were eventually incorporated into the 1990 standard by way of intrinsic inquiry functions. The widespread (now almost universal) adoption of the IEEE 754 standard for binary floating-point arithmetic has essentially removed this problem.

Access to the computing environment (e.g., the program's command line, environment variables, textual explanation of error conditions) remained a problem until it was addressed by the 2003 standard.

Large collections of library software that could be described as being loosely related to engineering and scientific calculations, such as graphics libraries, have been written in C, and therefore access to them presented a portability problem. This has been addressed by incorporation of C interoperability into the 2003 standard.

It is now possible (and relatively easy) to write an entirely portable program in Fortran, even without recourse to a preprocessor.

Obsolete variants
Until the Fortran 66 standard was developed, each compiler supported its own variant of Fortran. Some were more divergent from the mainstream than others.

The first Fortran compiler set a high standard of efficiency for compiled code. This goal made it difficult to create a compiler so it was usually done by the computer manufacturers to support hardware sales. This left an important niche: compilers that were fast and provided good diagnostics for the programmer (often a student). Examples include Watfor, Watfiv, PUFFT, and on a smaller scale, FORGO, Wits Fortran, and Kingston Fortran 2.

Fortran 5 was marketed by Data General Corp from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, for the Nova, Eclipse, and MV line of computers. It had an optimizing compiler that was quite good for minicomputers of its time. The language most closely resembles FORTRAN 66.

FORTRAN V was distributed by Control Data Corporation in 1968 for the CDC 6600 series. The language was based upon FORTRAN IV.

Univac also offered a compiler for the 1100 series known as FORTRAN V. A spinoff of Univac Fortran V was Athena FORTRAN.

Specific variants produced by the vendors of high-performance scientific computers (e.g., Burroughs, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray, Honeywell, IBM, Texas Instruments, and UNIVAC) added extensions to Fortran to take advantage of special hardware features such as instruction cache, CPU pipelines, and vector arrays. For example, one of IBM's FORTRAN compilers (H Extended IUP) had a level of optimization which reordered the machine code instructions to keep multiple internal arithmetic units busy simultaneously. Another example is CFD, a special variant of FORTRAN designed specifically for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer, running at NASA's Ames Research Center. IBM Research Labs also developed an extended FORTRAN-based language called VECTRAN for processing vectors and matrices.

Object-Oriented Fortran was an object-oriented extension of Fortran, in which data items can be grouped into objects, which can be instantiated and executed in parallel. It was available for Sun, Iris, iPSC, and nCUBE, but is no longer supported.

Such machine-specific extensions have either disappeared over time or have had elements incorporated into the main standards. The major remaining extension is OpenMP, which is a cross-platform extension for shared memory programming. One new extension, Coarray Fortran, is intended to support parallel programming.

FOR TRANSIT was the name of a reduced version of the IBM 704 FORTRAN language, which was implemented for the IBM 650, using a translator program developed at Carnegie in the late 1950s. The following comment appears in the IBM Reference Manual (FOR TRANSIT Automatic Coding System C28-4038, Copyright 1957, 1959 by IBM):

"The FORTRAN system was designed for a more complex machine than the 650, and consequently some of the 32 statements found in the FORTRAN Programmer's Reference Manual are not acceptable to the FOR TRANSIT system. In addition, certain restrictions to the FORTRAN language have been added. However, none of these restrictions make a source program written for FOR TRANSIT incompatible with the FORTRAN system for the 704."

The permissible statements were:

 * Arithmetic assignment statements, e.g.,
 * GO to n
 * PAUSE
 * STOP
 * CONTINUE
 * END
 * READ n, list
 * PUNCH n, list
 * DIMENSION V, V, V, ...
 * EQUIVALENCE (a,b,c), (d,c), ...
 * PUNCH n, list
 * DIMENSION V, V, V, ...
 * EQUIVALENCE (a,b,c), (d,c), ...

Up to ten subroutines could be used in one program.

FOR TRANSIT statements were limited to columns 7 through 56, only. Punched cards were used for input and output on the IBM 650. Three passes were required to translate source code to the "IT" language, then to compile the IT statements into SOAP assembly language, and finally to produce the object program, which could then be loaded into the machine to run the program (using punched cards for data input, and outputting results onto punched cards).

Two versions existed for the 650s with a 2000 word memory drum: FOR TRANSIT I (S) and FOR TRANSIT II, the latter for machines equipped with indexing registers and automatic floating-point decimal (bi-quinary) arithmetic. Appendix A of the manual included wiring diagrams for the IBM 533 card reader/punch control panel.

Fortran-based languages
Prior to FORTRAN 77, a number of preprocessors were commonly used to provide a friendlier language, with the advantage that the preprocessed code could be compiled on any machine with a standard FORTRAN compiler. These preprocessors would typically support structured programming, variable names longer than six characters, additional data types, conditional compilation, and even macro capabilities. Popular preprocessors included EFL, FLECS, iftran, MORTRAN, SFtran, S-Fortran, Ratfor, and Ratfiv. EFL, Ratfor and Ratfiv, for example, implemented C-like languages, outputting preprocessed code in standard FORTRAN 66. The PFORT preprocessor was often used to verify that code conformed to a portable subset of the language. Despite advances in the Fortran language, preprocessors continue to be used for conditional compilation and macro substitution.

One of the earliest versions of FORTRAN, introduced in the '60s, was popularly used in colleges and universities. Developed, supported, and distributed by the University of Waterloo, WATFOR was based largely on FORTRAN IV. A student using WATFOR could submit their batch FORTRAN job and, if there were no syntax errors, the program would move straight to execution. This simplification allowed students to concentrate on their program's syntax and semantics, or execution logic flow, rather than dealing with submission Job Control Language (JCL), the compile/link-edit/execution successive process(es), or other complexities of the mainframe/minicomputer environment. A down side to this simplified environment was that WATFOR was not a good choice for programmers needing the expanded abilities of their host processor(s), e.g., WATFOR typically had very limited access to I/O devices. WATFOR was succeeded by WATFIV and its later versions.

(line programming)

LRLTRAN was developed at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory to provide support for vector arithmetic and dynamic storage, among other extensions to support systems programming. The distribution included the Livermore Time Sharing System (LTSS) operating system.

The Fortran-95 Standard includes an optional Part 3 which defines an optional conditional compilation capability. This capability is often referred to as "CoCo".

Many Fortran compilers have integrated subsets of the C preprocessor into their systems.

SIMSCRIPT is an application specific Fortran preprocessor for modeling and simulating large discrete systems.

The F programming language was designed to be a clean subset of Fortran 95 that attempted to remove the redundant, unstructured, and deprecated features of Fortran, such as the EQUIVALENCE statement. F retains the array features added in Fortran 90, and removes control statements that were made obsolete by structured programming constructs added to both FORTRAN 77 and Fortran 90. F is described by its creators as "a compiled, structured, array programming language especially well suited to education and scientific computing". Essential Lahey Fortran 90 (ELF90) was a similar subset.

Lahey and Fujitsu teamed up to create Fortran for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Silverfrost FTN95 is also capable of creating .NET code.

Code examples
The following program illustrates dynamic memory allocation and array-based operations, two features introduced with Fortran 90. Particularly noteworthy is the absence of DO loops and IF/THEN statements in manipulating the array; mathematical operations are applied to the array as a whole. Also apparent is the use of descriptive variable names and general code formatting that conform with contemporary programming style. This example computes an average over data entered interactively.

Humor
During the same FORTRAN standards committee meeting at which the name "FORTRAN 77" was chosen, a satirical technical proposal was incorporated into the official distribution bearing the title "Letter O Considered Harmful". This proposal purported to address the confusion that sometimes arises between the letter "O" and the numeral zero, by eliminating the letter from allowable variable names. However, the method proposed was to eliminate the letter from the character set entirely (thereby retaining 48 as the number of lexical characters, which the colon had increased to 49). This was considered beneficial in that it would promote structured programming, by making it impossible to use the notorious GO TO statement as before. (Troublesome FORMAT statements would also be eliminated.) It was noted that this "might invalidate some existing programs" but that most of these "probably were non-conforming, anyway".

When X3J3 debated whether the minimum trip count for a DO loop should be zero or one in Fortran 77, Loren Meissner suggested a minimum trip count of two—reasoning (tongue-in-cheek) that if it were less than two, then there would be no reason for a loop.

When assumed-length arrays were being added, there was a dispute as to the appropriate character to separate upper and lower bounds. In a comment examining these arguments, Walt Brainerd penned an article entitled "Astronomy vs. Gastroenterology" because some proponents had suggested using the star or asterisk ("*"), while others favored the colon (":").

Variable names beginning with the letters I–N have a default type of integer, while variables starting with any other letters defaulted to real, although programmers could override the defaults with an explicit declaration. This led to the joke: "In FORTRAN, GOD is REAL (unless declared INTEGER)."

title: Fortran


text:
Fortaleza

Fortaleza is the state capital of Ceará, located in Northeastern Brazil. It is Brazil's 4th largest city, having surpassed Salvador in 2022 census with a population of slightly over 2.4 million, and the 12th largest city by gross domestic product. It forms the core of the Fortaleza metropolitan area, which is home to almost 4 million people.

Fortaleza is an important industrial and commercial center of Northeast Brazil. According to the Ministry of Tourism, it is the fourth most visited city and tourist destination in the country. The BR-116, the most important highway in the country, starts in Fortaleza. The municipality is part of the Mercosur common market, and vital trade port which is closest to mainland Europe, being 5608 km from Lisbon, Portugal.

To the north of the city lies the Atlantic Ocean; to the south are the municipalities of Pacatuba, Eusébio, Maracanaú and Itaitinga; to the east is the municipality of Aquiraz and the Atlantic Ocean; and to the west is the municipality of Caucaia. Residents of the city are known as Fortalezenses. Fortaleza is one of the three leading cities in the Northeast region together with Recife and Salvador.

Colonial period
Colonisation began in 1603 when Portugal was part of the Iberian Union, when the Portuguese Pero Coelho de Souza constructed the Fort of São Tiago and founded the settlement of Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon). After a victory over the French in 1612, Martins Soares Moreno expanded the Fort of São Tiago and changed its name to Forte de São Sebastião.

In 1630 the Dutch invaded the Brazilian Northeast and in 1637 they took the Fort of São Sebastião and ruled over Ceará. In battles with the Portuguese and natives in 1644 the fort was destroyed. Under captain Matthias Beck the Dutch West Indies Company built a new fortress by the banks of river Pajeú. Fort Schoonenborch ("graceful stronghold") officially opened on August 19, 1649. After the capitulation of Pernambuco in 1654, the Dutch handed over this fortress to the Portuguese, who renamed it Fortaleza da Nossa Senhora de Assunção ("Fort of Our Lady of the Assumption"), after which the city of Fortaleza takes its name.

Fortaleza was officially founded as a village 1726, becoming the capital of Ceará state in 1799.

Imperial period
During the 19th century, Fortaleza was consolidated as an urban centre in Ceará, supported by the cotton industry. With the transformation of the city into a regional export center and with the increase of direct navigation to Europe, the customs building of Fortaleza was built in 1812. In 1824, the city was targeted by the revolutionaries of Confederation of the Equator.

Republican period
The city gained a number of new districts in the 1930s, including Messejana and Porangaba. In 1954, the first university in the city was created, the Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC).

In 1983 the city started to integrate the territory of the new city of Maracanaú, which, just some years ago, was made again part of the Greater Fortaleza (the city's Metropolitan area). In the 1980s, Fortaleza exceeded Recife in population terms, becoming the second most populous city in Northeastern Brazil, with 2,571,896 inhabitants.

Climate
Fortaleza has a typical tropical climate, specifically a tropical wet and dry climate (Köppen climate classification: Aw/As), with high temperatures and relative humidity throughout the year. However, these conditions are usually relieved by pleasant winds blowing from the ocean. Average temperatures are not much different throughout the year. December is the warmest month, with a high of 31.7 C and low of 24.9 C. The rainy season spans from January to July, with rainfall particularly prodigious in March and April. The average annual temperature is 27.0 C. The relative humidity in Fortaleza is 77.5%, with average annual rainfall of 1584.0 mm. There is usually rain during the first seven months of the year from January to July. During this period, relative humidity is high. Fortaleza's climate is usually very dry from August to December, with very little rainfall.

Rainfall is akin to all of Northeastern Brazil among the most variable in the world, comparable (for similar average annual rainfalls) to central Queensland cities such as Townsville and Mackay. In the notorious drought year of 1877 as little as 468 mm fell, and in 1958 only 518 mm, but in the Nordeste's record wet year of 1985 Fortaleza received 2841 mm.

Vegetation
In Fortaleza there are some remaining areas of mangrove in preserved areas, including Cocó Park. Ten miles offshore is the Pedra da Risca do Meio Marine State Park, created in 1997 to protect the reefs.

Ecology and environment

The vegetation of Fortaleza is typically coastal. The restinga areas are found in dune regions near the mouths of the Ceará, Cocó and Pacoti rivers, in the beds of which there is still a mangrove forest. In other green areas of the city, there is no longer native vegetation, consisting of varied vegetation, fruit trees primarily. The city is home to seven environmental conservation units. These are the Sabiaguaba Dunes Municipal Natural Park, the Sabiaguaba Environmental Protection Area, the Maraponga Lagoon Ecological Park, the Cocó Ecological Park, the Ceará River Estuary Environmental Protection Area, the Environmental Protection Area of the Rio Pacoti and the Pedra da Risca do Meio Marine State Park. There is also, in the city, the Area of Relevant Ecological Interest of Sírio Curió, that protects the last enclave of Atlantic Forest in the urban zone.

The Cocó River is part of the river basin of the east coast of Ceará and has a total length of about 50 km in its main area. The park is inserted in the area of greater environmental sensitivity of the city, where it is possible to identify geoenvironmental formations such as coastal plain, fluvial plain and surface of the coastal trays. The Cocó river mangrove is home to mollusks, crustaceans, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals. The park has a structure of visitation, with guides, ecological trails and equipment and events of environmental education and ecotourism. The Coaçu River, affluent of the river Cocó, forms in its bed the lagoon of the Precabura.

The Rio Pacoti provides much of the water supply for Fortaleza. At the municipal boundary with Caucaia, the estuary of the Rio Ceará is covered by an environmental protection area (APA), which was set up in 1999.

Demographics
According to the 2022 census, there were 2,428,708 people residing in the city of Fortaleza. The census revealed the following numbers: 1,456,901 Pardo (multiracial) people (60%), 793,975 White people (32.7%), 171,018 Black people (7%), 3,127 Asian people (0.1%), 3,000 Amerindian people (0.1%).

In 2010, the city of Fortaleza was the 5th most populous city proper in Brazil, after São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Brasília. Currently, Fortaleza is the 4th largest city in Brazil in terms of population. In 2010, the city had 433,942 opposite-sex couples and 1,559 same-sex couples. The population of Fortaleza was 53.2% female and 46.8% male.

The following cities are included in the metropolitan area of Fortaleza (ordered by population): Fortaleza, Caucaia, Maracanaú, Maranguape, Aquiraz, Pacatuba, Pacajus, Horizonte, São Gonçalo do Amarante, Itatinga, Guaiúba and Chorozinho.

According to a genetic study from 2011, 'pardos' and whites' from Fortaleza, which comprise the largest share of the population, showed European ancestry of about 70%, the rest divided between Native American and African ancestries. A 2015 study, however, found out the following composition in Fortaleza: 48.9% of European contribution, 35,4% of Native American input and 15.7% of African ancestry.

Religion
The prevailing religion of Fortaleza is the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity.

''Source: IBGE 2000. ''

According to the census of 2010, 1,664,521 people, 67.88% of the population, followed Roman Catholicism, 523,456 (21.35%) were Protestant, 31,691 (1.29%) represented Spiritism and 162,985 (6.65%) had no religion whatsoever. Other religions, such as Umbanda, Candomblé, other Afro-Brazilian religions, Spiritualism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, other Eastern religions, Esotericism and other Christian churches like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a smaller number of adherents.

Politics

The administration of the municipality is made from the executive and legislative branches. Former mayor Roberto Cláudio, of the PDT, won 650,607 votes in the 2012 election, and was elected mayor. Legislative power rests with the City Council of Fortaleza, composed of 43 city councilors, elected for four-year terms, responsible for drafting municipal laws and supervising the executive. The municipality is, in addition, governed by organic law. In January 2015, there were 1,659,091 voters in Fortaleza (26.457% of the total state), distributed in thirteen electoral zones. The number of persons directly and indirectly employed in the municipal public administration in 2013 was respectively 31,318 and 4,950.

The city also houses the seat of state executive power, the Abolition Palace, previously occupied by former governor Camilo Santana, of the PT, elected in the general elections in Brazil in 2014. historically headquarters of the Iracema Club, which was Ceded to the Municipal Hall and now houses municipal executive bodies. In the city, there is the Administrative Center Governor Virgílio Távora.

Among the institutions present in the city, are the Fortaleza Air Base, the Port Authority of Ceará, School of Apprentice Sailors of Ceará and the Command of the Tenth Military Region. The city also has units of the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNICEF. Since 1996, a city is part of the Common Market of Cities of Mercosur.

Economy
Fortaleza has the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Northeast Region, surpassing Recife and Salvador. In 2021, the GDP of Fortaleza reached the value of 73.4 billion Reais, the eleventh highest of the country. In the same year, the value of taxes on products net of subsidies at current prices was R$12,811,311,235 and the municipality's GDP per capita was R$27.164,45. The city's booming economy is reflected in purchasing power, the country's eighth largest, with estimated consumption potential at 42 billion reais in 2014.

The main economic source of the municipality is centered in the tertiary sector, with its diversified segments of commerce and service rendering. Next, the secondary sector stands out, with the industrial complexes. In 2021, the city had 848,283 people in employment.

Culture
According to the Master Plan of Fortaleza, the Special Areas for the Preservation of Historic, Cultural and Archaeological Heritage are the regions of the center, Parangaba, Alagadiço Novo/José de Alencar, Benfica, Porangabuçu and Praia de Iracema. Properties of conservation interest. The architectural heritage of Fortaleza in the form of fallen goods, however, is predominantly concentrated in the center of the city. The Mucuripe Lighthouse is unfortunately in ruins today, Ceará and Fortaleza were part of the pioneering group of states and cities to adopt public policies to protect the living intangible heritage of their culture, through the Masters of Culture program.

Museums, theatres and cultural spaces
Among the theaters, the largest and most popular are Theatro José de Alencar, São José Theater, São Luiz Cinema Theater, and Teatro RioMar and Teatro Via Sul. The Ceará Museum houses numerous artifacts, including pieces of paleontology and furniture. The Dragão do Mar Center of Art and Culture is the main cultural centre, and includes the Ceará Museum of Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ceará, theaters, a planetarium, cinemas, shops and spaces for public presentations, as well as housing the Public Library Governador Menezes Pimentel, Oporto Iracema of the Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts Thomaz Pompeu Sobrinho. The Casa de Jose Alencar is one of the Brazilian museums recognised as dealing with Brazilian literature. It was opened in 1964 and houses art collections, a gallery, a library and the ruins of the first steam power plant in Ceará. In the different SERs of the city, the complexes of the CUCA Network are spread, which are facilities dedicated to art, leisure and education, especially for young people.

Freemasonry is represented by the Grand Masonic Lodge of Ceará and the Great State East of Ceará. There are also service clubs in the city, such as the Lions Club and Rotary International.

The Ceará handicraft has its main market and showcase in Fortaleza. In the city, there are several specific places for trade in handicraft products, such as the Ceará Craft Center (CeArt), Ceará Tourism Center (Emcetur), Crafts Fair of Beira-Mar, and on Avenida Monsenhor Tabosa.

Literature and cinema
The main literary manifestation of Fortaleza's history emerged at the end of the 19th century, in the cafes of Praça do Ferreira, known as the Spiritual Bakery, a pioneer in the dissemination of modern ideas in Brazilian literature that would only be adopted nationally in the following century, in the Modern Art Week. The most important historical entities of high culture still present in the city are the Ceará Institute and the Ceará Academy of Letters, the first academy of letters created in Brazil, founded in 1887 and 1894 respectively. The Ceará Institute has helped launch important names in national historiography and philosophy, such as Farias Brito and Capistrano de Abreu. Among the writers who are members of the Cearense Academy of Letters and members or patrons of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, are Gustavo Barroso, Araripe Júnior, José de Alencar, Heráclito Graça, Franklin Tavora, Clóvis Beviláqua and Rachel de Queiroz, the first woman to Be part of the entity. The Casa de Juvenal Galeno is another historical cultural institution of Fortaleza, named after one of the greatest poets born in the city, Juvenal Galeno. The house became well known for its festivals of poetry and seminaries.

In cinema, the most well known name is Zelito Viana, director of films like Villa-Lobos: A Life of Passion and Life and Death of Severina. More recently, Karim Aïnouz has directed Madame Satã, Suely in the Sky and Futuro Beach, and script of Lower City, Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and Behind the Sun. Another current exponent of cinema born in Fortaleza is Halder Gomes, director and screenwriter of Holliúdy Cinema. New filmmakers in the city have gained in recent years prominent exhibitions such as at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. The most traditional cinema event in Fortaleza is the Cine Ceará (Ibero-American Film Festival), considered one of the main festivals of the country.

Fashion
The main fashion name in the city is the Lino Villaventura, who, from Fortaleza, designed himself nationally and internationally and today is one of the main names of São Paulo Fashion Week, besides being one of the founding designers of this fashion week. There are major events in the city, such as the Dragão Fashion Brasil, considered the largest fashion event in the Northeast and the third largest in the country.

Much of the clothing that is produced in Ceará flows through Fortaleza, which in turn is recognized as one of the most important textile centers of the country, giving the garment industry great weight in the metropolitan economy. Brands of the city like Santana Textiles and headquarters of brands like Esplanada and Otoch have considerable regional influence.

Music
Forró is the most popular musical genre in the city. Bands originating in Fortaleza, such as Desejo de Menina and Aviões do Forró, were responsible for the popularization of electronic forró, which promoted the revaluation of the accordion in the genre and brought it closer to pop music. The forró pé-de serra, however, still holds great cultural influence and commercial prominence in the city.

In Música popular brasileira, some of the names from Fortaleza were Fagner, Ednardo, Belchior (from Sobral but lived in Fortaleza) and Amelinha. The musical tradition of Fortaleza, however, goes back to the composer Alberto Nepomuceno, one of the greatest names in classical music in Brazil, a pioneer in the development of the country's musical nationalism, and therefore considered the "founder of Brazilian music". The Alberto Nepomuceno Conservatory is one of the city's leading music schools.

Carnival
Fortaleza hosts one of the noted Brazilian Carnivals. Its main locations are Iracema Beach and Avenue Domingos Olimpio.

Cuisine
The gastronomy of Fortaleza is very close to the typical Northeastern cuisine, and, traditional include the baião de dois, usually accompanied by barbecue of mutton or meat of sun, and tapioca which is a pancake made from the starch of cassava. The seafood is another ingredient of typical dishes of fortalezeense cuisine, such as the steak moqueca and the mackerel and snapper fish.

The fruit of the sea identity of the coast of the state is the crab. Shrimp and lobster are also widely used delicacies in dishes such as shrimp rice or shrimp dumplings.

Tourism
Acquario Ceará, due to be one of the largest oceanariums in Brazil, is currently under construction. Attractions such as the Beach Park theme park, located in the Great Fortaleza, Avenida Beira Mar and its bars, restaurants and music clubs, the beaches of Futuro and Iracema and Pirata Bar have placed Fortaleza among the Brazilian destinations preferred by Europeans.

Scuba diving is possible in the area of Pedra da Risca do Meio Marine State Park, a marine protected area located about 10 nautical miles from the shoreline of Fortaleza.

Fortaleza has about 25 km of urban beaches. Mucuripe is the place where jangadas can be found. Still used by fishermen to go into high seas, jangadas can be seen along the way during the afternoon and evenings, and returning from the sea in the morning; part of the catch of the day is sold in an old-style fish market.

Education

In 2010, the level of the education factor of the Strengthening Human Development Index was medium, despite its great advance, which went from 0.367 to 0.695 between 1991 and 2010. According to data from the 2010 Human Development Atlas of Brazil, Fortaleza's adult education levels were divided as follows: 8.57% did not complete primary school or were illiterate, 62.43% had completed elementary education, 45.93% had completed high school and 13.73% had completed higher education.

Health
The health indexes of the Fortaleza population are better than the Brazilian average. According to data from 2010, the infant mortality rate up to one year old was 15.8 per 1000 live births in Fortaleza, against a Brazilian average of 16.7. By 2013, 90.6% of children under one year of age had their immunization records up to date. In 2012, 37,577 live births were registered, and the infant mortality rate up to five years of age was 13.2 per 1000. Of the total number of children under two years old weighed by the Family Health Program in 2013, 0.8% were malnourished.

In 2009, Fortaleza had a total of 35 general hospitals, of which 11 were public, 21 were private, two were philanthropic, and one was a trade union. The Doctor José Frota Institute is the largest hospital administered by the Municipal Government, and the General Hospital of Fortaleza is the largest hospital administered by the State Government. In addition, it had 54 specialized hospitals and eight polyclinics. The total number of physicians working in the health network of the municipality was 13,604, approximately 5.4 per thousand inhabitants. Fortaleza has 117 units of health posts, three Unidade de pronto atendimento administered by the municipality and six administered by the state. The first hospital built in Fortaleza was the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, founded in 1861. Among the most important public health institutions in the city, the most important is the Dr. José Frota Institute, the largest hospital administered by the Municipal Government, and the General Hospital of Fortaleza, the largest hospital administered by the State Government. Among the private institutions, the largest are the Unimed Fortaleza Regional Hospital, Antônio Prudente Hospital, Monte Klinikum Hospital and São Mateus Hospital.

One of the most important basic health programs in Fortaleza is the Family Health Program, within which the city is in third place in the country in extension of coverage, with hundreds of teams distributed in dozens of care units. The Emergency Mobile Care Service (SAMU) is the municipality's health care service, which serves an average of 200 daily occurrences.

The University Hospital Walter Cantídio is the largest liver transplantation facility in the country. The Faculty of Medicine of the UFC is the 13th best medical school in Brazil, 2nd best medical school in the North and Northeast regions and the best medical school in Ceará. UFC's medical degree is still one of the most popular in the country.

International Airport

The current passenger terminal of Pinto Martins – Fortaleza International Airport, located in the center of Fortaleza, was built between 1996 and 1998. The airport has undergone an expansion process, from which the number of boarding bridges increased from seven to sixteen and the passenger terminal has been expanded from 38,000 m2 to 133,000 m2. In 2014, the airport was capable of serving 6.2 million passengers per year, but after the expansion, capacity is at 11.2 million.

Pinto Martins Airport is the third busiest airport in the Northeast Region and one of the busiest in the country, receiving on average 1,500 international aircraft and 65,000 domestic aircraft per year. In 2013, it received more than 5.9 million passengers.

Air Force Base
Fortaleza Air Force Base - BAFZ, a base of the Brazilian Air Force, is located in Fortaleza.

Roads

In 2013, Fortaleza had 908,074 vehicles, of which 511,109 were cars, and 229,154 motorcycles. Traffic density at peak times in the city is rated as the fourth largest in the country, with 48% of congested roads. The cycle network of Fortaleza is composed of 116.4 km, of which 78.8 km are cycle paths and 37.6 km are cycle paths. The municipality also has a public bicycle system, Bicycletar, which had 40 stations and 400 units in April 2015. In 2015, the municipal taxi fleet was composed of 4,886 vehicles, including common, adapted and special use vehicles.

The city's road transport system is regulated by the Fortaleza Urban Transportation Company (ETUFOR), an agency of the Municipality of Fortaleza. The collective transport carried out by buses is called the Integrated Transportation System (SIT-FOR), and its operation began in 1992.

The system of traffic monitoring is known by the acronym CTAFOR, which stands for "Controle de Tráfego em Área de Fortaleza" (Traffic Control of the Area of Fortaleza).

Subway

The Fortaleza Metro comprises five lines.

The Fortaleza Metro started on October 1, 2014. As of 2014 18 of the 20 stations planned for the South Line are in operation, along with 9 stations of the West Line.

MetroFor is the 43 km rapid transit system for the city of Fortaleza.

Bus stations
Fortaleza has multiple Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, lines throughout the city and has plans to extend this network of transportation (BRTBrasil.org)

Bike lanes
Fortaleza officially has 116.4 km of bike lanes.

Sports
The main games of the Ceará State Championship are played in Fortaleza. There are several association football clubs in the city, including Ceará SC, Fortaleza EC and Ferroviário AC. Fortaleza was one of the host cities of the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup and 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Official subdivision
Fortaleza is subdivided in 121 neighborhoods, that are grouped in 39 administrative territories, managed by 12 subprefectures (Secreterias Executivas Regionais). Each subprefecture has a holder appointed by the municipal government.

Neighborhoods

 * Dom Lustosa
 * Parangaba
 * Pirambu
 * Praia de Iracema
 * Rodolfo Teófilo

Notable people

 * Neuma Aguiar (1938–2023), Brazilian sociologist who pioneered women's studies in the country
 * José de Alencar, famous writer from the 19th century
 * Alberto Nepomuceno, famous composer from the 19th century
 * Rachel de Queiroz, first female writer in Academia Brasileira de Letras
 * André Diamant, international chess grandmaster
 * Casimiro Montenegro Filho, founder of the Brazilian Air Force Aeronautical Technologic Institute - ITA
 * Maurício Peixoto, mathematician, one of the founders of IMPA
 * Gilberto Câmara, former director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE)
 * Tom Cavalcante, Brazilian actor and comedian
 * Castelo Branco, former dictator of Brazil (1964–67)
 * Márcio Araújo, Brazilian beach volleyball player, Olympic medallist
 * Ed Lincoln, musician and composer
 * Thiago Monteiro, table tennis player
 * Raffael, professional footballer
 * Ronny Araújo, professional footballer
 * Mário Jardel, retired professional footballer
 * José Gerardo Moreira Rocha Júnior, footballer
 * Otávio Dutra, professional footballer
 * Marcus Aurélio, mixed martial arts professional
 * Wilson Gouveia, mixed martial arts professional
 * Thiago Alves, mixed martial arts professional
 * Hermes França, mixed martial arts professional
 * Jorge Gurgel, mixed martial arts professional
 * Shelda Bede, Brazilian beach volleyball player, Olympic medallist
 * Thiago Monteiro, tennis player

International relations
Fortaleza is twinned with:

 * Ferreira do Alentejo, Portugal
 * Lisbon, Portugal
 * 🇺🇸 Miami Beach, United States
 * 🇮🇹 Montese, Italy
 * 🇨🇻 Praia, Cape Verde
 * 🇺🇸 Racine, United States
 * 🇨🇻 Sal, Cape Verde

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Fortaleza