{{short description, Late-20th century formatting language involving the use of Fortran Industrial Real-Time Fortran (IRTF) was developed, during the decade of 1970-1980, to augment the Fortran language with library bindings useful for process and device control, and I/O. Also included in IRTF was a set of bit-manipulation functions which were eventually incorporated into MIL_STD-1753 for Fortran-77, and later into Fortran-90.

History

The IRTF standard evolved from a series of workshops held at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...

in the early 1970s. The Fortran committee created a proposal which was approved and published by the

Instrument Society of America The International Society of Automation (ISA), formerly known as The Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society, is a non-profit technical society for engineers, technicians, businesspeople, educators and students, who work, study or are int ...

(ISA) as ISA Standard S61.1 (1972). The paper defined library calls for controlling the state of concurrently activated programs, process I/O, and bit manipulation. A second supplementary paper, ISA S61.2 (1973) was published a year later. This paper defined additional calls for random unformatted files, and bit manipulation. Additional work, including work on management of parallel tasks, was performed both in the U.S. as S61.3, and in Germany as ''Prozess-FORTRAN''. In 1980, a joint American/European proposal was published. While IRTF held some influence in certain markets in the 1970s, by the early 1980s most process control systems were being built using

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

-based systems where Fortran was not available. Because of this, the IRTF bindings have fallen into disuse. Modern systems tend to use

POSIX Threads POSIX Threads, commonly known as pthreads, is an execution model that exists independently from a language, as well as a parallel execution model. It allows a program to control multiple different flows of work that overlap in time. Each flow o ...

instead.

References

* ISA S61.1 (1972) Standard. Industrial Computer System FORTRAN Procedures for Executive Functions and Process Input-Output. Instrument Society of America, 1972 * ISA S61.2 (1973) Draft Standard: Industrial Computer System FORTRAN Procedures for Handling Random Unformatted Files, Bit Manipulation, and Date and Time Information. Instrument Society of America, 1973 * Industrial Real-Time FORTRAN (International Purdue Workshop/European Workshop on Industrial Computer Systems Tech Committee 1, Feb 1980) * Wilfried Kneis (October 1981). "Draft standard industrial real-time FORTRAN". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 16 (7): 45–60. * MIL-STD-1753. DoD Supplement to X3.9-1978. U. S. Government Printing Office. Fortran programming language family