Information Systems and Computer Applications CLEP Prep Practice Exam 2026 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Mastery!

Fortran, which is short for "Formula Translation", was first developed in 1957 by a group of IBM programmers. It was one of the earliest high-level programming languages and was specifically designed for scientific and engineering applications. Assembly language (A) was the first low-level programming language, which was used prior to high-level languages like Fortran. C language (B) and BASIC language (C) were developed after Fortran and are also high-level languages, but they were not the first programming languages. Machine language (D) is the most basic and primitive form of programming language, which directly corresponds to instructions executed by a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Therefore, Fortran was not developed in machine language because it is a high-level language.