Why is Fortran extensively used in scientific computing and not at all in the industry like COBOL?

Answer 1

My best answer to this question is that fortran / compiler was been highly optimized for math/floating point whereas cobol was optimized for general business computing - and each language was focused for the audience. (If memory serves - this is going back - fortran never used pointers out of the compilation whereas COBOL/structures did --- that's just a memory going back 30+ years so take it for what it's worth).

I think it's more the direction the language is/was going at the time, and its usage --- I worked extensively on PL/1 - (which I found superior in expressions than either of them - IBM designed the language as a successor / cominbation of both). In those days however - finding a language that would reduce your CPU $ versus a language that was easier to program/maintain outside the pure math computation sphere was usually the decision-maker..(?)

You can always take a comparison of the two languages, doing the same general thing - and look at their optimized output - but regardless - if you're comparing apples to apples - is it the performance or the ease of maintenance / understandaibility is what is most important?

My two cents...