A Review of Approaches to Teaching Fortran

Fortran continues to be taught as a first programming language in many engineering curriculums. Two teaching approaches are predominant: the conventional approach and the preprocessor approach. The latter introduces the concepts of structured programming by using an augmented version of Fortran which is translated into standard Fortran IV by a special preprocessor program. A third approach has been successfully used at the University of Santa Clara. It emphasizes the inherent block structure of the subprogram facility of standard Fortran as the key to top-down program implementation.