Fortran 5

Fortran 5 was an electronic music band active during the 1990s.

Background

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.

Discography

Fortran

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).