This allowed assembly language modules to be linked to FORTRAN modules. The very same year, FORTRAN III was developed but was never released to the public. FORTRAN III was to add the ability to include assembly code inside of FORTRAN code, improving efficiency in some cases. Nineteen sixty-one saw the release of FORTRAN IV. This release was a reorganization of FORTRAN code. Statements like common and equivalence were improved. Improvements in FORTRAN IV caused incompatibility with earlier code written for FORTRAN II. In May of nineteen sixty-two, the American National Standards Institute, or the ANSI committee started developing a standard for FORTRAN. This would be the first standard to be published for any computer language. Also in ninety sixty-two, computer manufacturers started including FORTRAN on all the new computers produced. This helped FORTRAN reach more people across the United States. A FORTRAN standard was finally released in nineteen sixty-six. Since then, two more standards have been released. The first was in nineteen ninety and added long awaited changes to the language. The second appeared in nineteen ninety-five. The next volume is to be released later this year, and will be under the title, FORTRAN 2000. The developers of FORTRAN developed many features that are found in nearly every programming language. FORTRAN was the first to have what was commonly known as "block if statements" or also called "if then else" statements (Stroustrup 1). It was also the first to have a prechecking "while loop". Before the while loop statement, all loops were postchecking loops meaning the code was executed at least once. To stop this the programmer would have to have an if statement before the loop to stop it from even executing the first time. FORTRAN also introduced the character storage variable. Before this, all characters were stored within an integer variable or as a number (Ritchie 2).
