[tzs]

> From the outset, it could handle complex numbers, double precision, etc., etc. natively without having to resort to calling libraries/special routines as other languages had to do back then.

At least until sometime in the '80s another advantage of Fortran over C was that it could handle single precision floating point. C always promoted float to double when you did arithmetic with it.

Arithmetic was faster on floats than doubles, and that could make quite a difference in a big simulation that was going to take a long time to run.

The high energy physics group at Caltech back then had a locally modified version of the C compiler that would use single precision when the code tries to do arithmetic on floats. Some of the physicists used that for programs that otherwise would have been in Fortran.