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Fortran is a general purpose, procedural and imperative programming language. Fortran was proposed and designed by John W. Backus as alternative for the IBM 704 assembly language. A draft specification for the IBM mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by mid 1954. The first Fortran compiler appeared in 1957 and was the first widely used high-level programming language. Successive versions have added varios features over the years, such as recursive routines and dynamic memory allocation in Fortran 90. Many early chess programs were written in Fortran.

Punched card

Punched card from a Fortran program: Z(1) = Y + W(1) [1]

Sample Chess Code

A recursive Fortran 90 Alpha-Beta search routine ^[2]:

RECURSIVE FUNCTION EVALUATE (ID, PRUNE) RESULT (RES) 
  USE GLOBALS 
  IMPLICIT INTEGER(A-Z) 
  DIMENSION XX(0:26), YY(0:26), CC(0:26) 
  LEVEL=LEVEL+1 
  BESTSCORE=10000*ID 
  DO B=7,0, -1 
     DO A=7,0, -1 
        ! generate the moves for all the pieces 
        ! and iterate through them 
        IF (SGN(BOARD(B,A))/=ID) CYCLE 
        CALL MOVELIST (A, B, XX, YY, CC, NDX) 
        DO I=0,NDX,1 
           X=XX(I); Y=YY(I); C=CC(I) 
           OLDSCORE=SCORE; MOVER=BOARD(B,A); TARG=BOARD(Y,X) 
           ! make the move and evaluate the new position 
           ! recursively. Targ holds the relative value of the piece 
           ! allowing use to calculate material gain/loss 
           CALL MAKEMOVE (A, B, X, Y, C) 
           IF (LEVEL<MAXLEVEL) THEN 
              SCORE=SCORE+EVALUATE(-ID, & 
                    BESTSCORE-TARG+ID*(8-ABS(4-X)-ABS(4-Y))) 
           END IF 
           SCORE=SCORE+TARG-ID*(8-ABS(4-X)-ABS(4-Y)) 
           ! we want to minimize the maximum possible loss 
           ! for black 
           IF ((ID<0 .AND. SCORE>BESTSCORE) .OR. & 
              (ID>0 .AND. SCORE<BESTSCORE)) THEN 
              BESTA(LEVEL)=A; BESTB(LEVEL)=B 
              BESTX(LEVEL)=X; BESTY(LEVEL)=Y 
              BESTSCORE=SCORE 
              IF ((ID<0 .AND. BESTSCORE>=PRUNE) .OR. & 
                 (ID>0 .AND. BESTSCORE<=PRUNE)) THEN 
                 BOARD(B,A)=MOVER; BOARD(Y,X)=TARG; SCORE=OLDSCORE 
                 LEVEL=LEVEL-1 
                 RES = BESTSCORE 
                 RETURN 
              END IF 
           END IF 
           BOARD(B,A)=MOVER; BOARD(Y,X)=TARG; SCORE=OLDSCORE 
        END DO 
     END DO 
  END DO 
  LEVEL=LEVEL-1 
  RES=BESTSCORE 
  RETURN 
END FUNCTION EVALUATE 

See also

• IBM 704

Publications

• P E Bryant and M J Baylis (1968). FORTRAN - A Comparative Study. Literature: Reports hosted by Atlas Computer Laboratory
• James Gillogly (1970). MAX : A FORTRAN Chess Player. RAND paper
• John Backus (1978) The history of Fortran I, II, and III. in Richard L. Wexelblat (ed) History of programming languages I
• Alfio Marazz, Johann Joss, Alex Randriamiharisoa (1993). Algorithms, routines, and S functions for robust statistics: the FORTRAN library ROBETH with an interface to S-PLUS. Wadsworth And Brooks/Cole Statistics/Probability Series, amazon

External Links

• Fortran from Wikipedia
• Cray Blitz FTP Page crayblitz.tar.gz Source Code, by Robert Hyatt
• Microsoft® FORTRAN Version Features
• Intel Fortran Compiler
• History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II — Software Preservation Group from The Computer History Museum
• Fortran FAQ
• comp.lang.fortran Discussion about Fortran

References

1. ^ Punched card from Wikipedia, Image from the Wikimedia Commons
2. ^ chessf90.zip, Source and 64 bit Windows executable of A Fortran 90 chess program from cap.connx.com by Dann Corbit

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