Fortran

Fortran was one of the pioneers of computer programming, developed purely for calculation of mathematical formulas, such as algebra, statistics, probability, and random number generation. It is still used in many sectors.

This is claimed to be one of the most efficient programming languages.

It makes no sense to speak of a programming language as efficient, only the implementation of that language. -- seaslug

It's also fairly well-known that Fortran is so kludgy and inexpressive that just a bit of laziness in APL can best it in its own domain, to say nothing of more modern functional languages. --water

We may say that Fortran is "efficient" in a sense: It can be compiled quickly because its syntax is a big regular expression (according to a friend of mine's opinion -- I know nothing on Fortran). But at the time modern parsing had yet to be invented, computers were slow and with little memory, etc. -- schizophonic

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