with early specifications defined in the early to middle 1950s. Like
COBOL, Fortran was designed for specific types of mainframe application
development, but in the scientific and numerical management
arenas. The name derives from an existing IBM system at the time,
Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System. Although the original
Fortran contained only 32 statements, it marked a significant improvement
over assembly-level programming that preceded it.
The current version as of the publication date of this book is Fortran
2008, formally approved by the appropriate standard committees
in 2010. Like COBOL, the evolution of Fortran added support for a
broad range of hardware and operating system platforms. However,
Fortran is probably used more in current development—as well as
older system maintenance—than COBOL