Conference on the Programming Environment for Development of Numerical Software
Charles L. Lawson · NASA STI Repository (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) · 1978
THE NUMERICAL SOFTWARE COMMUNITY, especially in North America, has predominately used the Fortran language In the late 60's, there may have been thoughts that some other language might soon replace Fortran for scientific computing.By the early 70's, however, this appeared much less likely and a number of people began developing prepro cessors and other software tools that would make some of the newer systematic approaches to software development and testing more readily available in Fortran environments, The 1974 SIGNUM Workshop on Fortran Preprocessors for Numerical Software held at the Jet Propulsion significance of this project for numerical software.Laboratory, Pasadena, spotlighted this developing area and initiated closer communication between SIGNUM and the ANSI Fortran Committee X3J3.Contacts established at the 1974 Workshop led to the organization of two Fortran Forum meetings in 1976, one in California and one in New York, providing early public discussion of the emerging Fortran 77 standardThe Workshop and the two Forums gave added impetus to a changing mood within X3J3.There was increased willingness to deal with significant additions to the language.In particular, it seems likely that the eventual decision to add the structured IF into Fortran 77 was strongly influenced by the considerable interest in structured Fortran evidenced at the Workshop.