All About FTM

F is a tradmark of Imagine1, Inc.

What is F?

F is a carefully crafted subset of the most recent version of Fortran, the world's most powerful numeric language. Teaching F instead of Pascal or C++ provides two significant advantages:

  1. Pascal is not used outside the educational community, so experience does not translate into a useful skill in the engineering or business world;
  2. C++ programming is complicated and is difficult for the beginner to grasp.

F retains the modern features of Fortran--modules and data abstraction, for example--but discards facilities such as EQUIVALENCE, which are difficult to teach, use, or debug. It is a safe and portable programming language. F may be used by the Fortran 77 programmer as a transition to the new concepts in Fortran 95 or in High Performance Fortran (HPF). F is a new programming language with a past and a future.

F encourages Module-Oriented Programming. "An F module is easy to code and understand. Compared to object-oriented programming, module-oriented programming has all the reuse without all the abuse," says David Epstein of Imagine1.

What is in Fortran 90 but not in F
The syntax of F, in BNF form (53KB)