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, crystallography 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).

The names of earlier versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were conventionally spelled in all-capitals (FORTRAN 77 was the last version in which the use of lowercase letters in keywords was strictly non-standard). The capitalization has been dropped in referring to newer versions beginning with Fortran 90. The official language standards now refer to the language as "Fortran" rather than all-caps "FORTRAN".

Answer this series of questions:

1. When was Fortran created?
2. For what purpose?
3. What was a name of an earlier version?
4. Did they purposely spell it with capital letters?
5. Has that practice ended?
6. Starting with which version?
7. What two words were used to come up with the name?
8. What kind of language is it?
9. Did it lead programming of this type?
10. How long has it been in use?
11. List something computationally intensive?
12. Is it used to test and assess the world's fastest computers?
13. What was added to new versions?
14. Did they keep it backwards compatible?
15. What kind of programming did they add support for?
16. What other support was also added?
17. How about in Fortran 95?
18. And in 2008?
1. in the 1950s
2. for scientific and engineering applications
3. FORTRAN 77
4. yes
5. yes
6. Fortran 90
7. Formula Translation
8. a general-purpose, imperative programming language
9. yes
10. for over half a century
11. numerical weather prediction
12. yes
13. extensions to the language
14. usually
15. structured programming
16. processing of character-based data
17. high performance
18. concurrent programming