FORTRAN

·         Readability-

Fortran is a programming language which supports GOTO statements, these types of statements support the navigation of code lines from one to another without any legal structure. As a result, when reading a code snippet written in Fortran it was tough to understand the output of the program. Also, there are large number of independent primitive constructs which leads to large number of combinations resulting in too much orthogonality. Due to this, it was not possible to explore and learn the language in a short period of time. Furthermore, Fortran allows special words to be used as variable names thus it was inconvenient to differentiate between the two when reading a program.

 

·         Writability- 

The factors affecting readability also affects writability as a result, the writability of Fortran is questionable. Even though Fortran allows sub programmes to be implemented, it doesn’t allow dynamic storage management with a heap. Hence writing programmes with dynamic heap variables is not possible in Fortran. Also, Fortran doesn’t provide any alternatives for its expressions, therefore it is tedious to write programs in Fortran.

 

·         Reliability-

 Fortran doesn’t provide any type checking features e.g., Strings can be stored in integer type variable. Due to this, mistakes can be made easily which will result in program errors. Also, Fortran doesn’t provide exception handling features which also contributes to error prone programs. As a result, Fortran can be considered as less reliable.