Coarray Fortran (CAF), formerly known as F--, started as an extension of Fortran 95/2003 for parallel processing created by Robert Numrich and John Reid in the 1990s. The Fortran 2008 standard (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010) now includes coarrays (spelled without hyphen), as decided at the May 2005 meeting of the ISO Fortran Committee; the syntax in the Fortran 2008 standard is slightly different from the original CAF proposal.
A CAF program is interpreted as if it were replicated a number of times and all copies were executed asynchronously. Each copy has its own set of data objects and is termed an image. The array syntax of Fortran is extended with additional trailing subscripts in square brackets to provide a concise representation of references to data that is spread across images.
The CAF extension has been available for a long time and was implemented in some Fortran compilers such as those from Cray (since release 3.1). Since the inclusion of coarrays in the Fortran 2008 standard, the number of implementations is growing. The first open-source compiler which implemented coarrays as specified in the Fortran 2008 standard for Linux architectures is G95. Currently, GNU Fortran provides wide coverage of Fortran's coarray features in single- and multi-image configuration (the latter based on the OpenCoarrays library). Another implementation of coarrays and related parallel extensions from Fortran 2008 is available in the OpenUH compiler (a branch of Open64) developed at the University of Houston.
Fortran (formerly FORTRAN, derived from "Formula Translation") is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics 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 encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with prior versions. Successive versions have added support for structured programming and processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, modular programming and generic programming (Fortran 90), high performance Fortran (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003) and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008).
Fortran 5 was an electronic music band active during the 1990s.
The band were made up of members David Baker and Simon Leonard, who had previously worked together on the music project known as I Start Counting. Around 1990, they had begun recording new material, and realised that the new music had a different sound compared to their previous electropop style. They decided to rename their project Fortran 5 in order to give their new dance/techno style a fresh start. The new project also involved the duo collaborating and working with a number of other artists. These included Kris Weston of The Orb, and Rod Slater from Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.
The band's final album was titled Avocado Suite and was their most experimental work; this was far removed from their early electropop sound.
Fortran 5 also remixed songs from artists such as Inspiral Carpets, Erasure and Laibach.
Simon Leonard also wrote a book called Fortran 5, which was published by Malice Aforethought Press.