FORTRAN is the oldest high-level language stilling widespread use today. It is popular in the scientific community, having libraries of mathematical subgroup-tines, and is also often chosen for its portability. New standards are developed for the language every few years，with FORTRAN77 being shortly superseded。   

　　FORTRAN allows independent compilation：Program comprises a main program and possibly other program units, which may be subroutines, functions or 'blocks' for data initialization。   

　　FORTRAN has an archaic syntax ．but will continue to be used in solving mathematical problems because of the body of experience in such use and the extensive library of routines available．It is also stronger than PASCAL on input-output. However it may be superseded by Adam when there are a sufficient number of implementations of Adam to give comparable portability, and when the libraries have been translated. Thus there may be little point in going beyond FORTRAN77 in standardization.

翻译：

FORTRAN语言    

　　FORTRA语言是目前仍在广泛 应用的最古老的高级语言。它在科 学界很普及，它具有许多数学子程序库，由于它的可移植性，所以它 经常被人们选用。每过几年，人们 就为该语言推出新的标准， FORTRAN77近期将被取代。    

　　FORTRAN允许独立编译：一个程序包含一个主程序，可能还包含其他几个程序单元，它们可能是例行子程序。函数或数据初始化用的“程序块”。

　　FORTRAN具有古体语法，但它将继续被用来解决数学问题，这是因为在这方面的应用中有许多经验主体和广泛应用的程序库。在输入输出方面，它也比PASCAL强。但是，当Ada语言中具有足够的实现手段以便具有可与FORTRAN比拟的可移植性时，以及当FORTRAN程序库已被翻译好时，FORTRAN可以被Ada所代替。所以在标准化方面，很少会有超过FORTRAN77的。