What Does FORTRAN 77 Mean?
FORTRAN77 is a version of the general-purpose imperative programming language FORTRAN. It is the successor of FORTRAN 66 and was proposed in 1977. FORTRAN77 addressed many key shortcomings of FORTRAN66 and added significant features to the programming language.
Techopedia Explains FORTRAN 77
FORTRAN was one of the first high-level programming languages. One of the salient features of FORTRAN applications is that they are portable across machine platforms. FORTRAN77 programs can run on any machine which has a FORTRAN77 compiler. Unlike other programming languages, FORTRAN77 has a strict set of rules regarding source code formatting. In other words, it is not a free-format programming language. FORTRAN77 ignores blank spaces. Even if all blanks were removed in a FORTRAN77 program, it would still be considered syntactically correct. When it comes to variable declarations, FORTRAN77 makes use of an implicit set of rules to declare a type. However, the language cannot share various program units, meaning global variables are not used in FORTRAN77.
