"Unless you are doing serious math and using the existing FORTRAN libraries, why on Earth would anybody want to pick up FORTRAN for pleasure?"
Well...it's vintage. Let's not forget what forum we're on. What would be more groovy then some game or whatever written in it? It's been quite some time, but it (at least the basics of it) were pretty easy to learn.
And as to the libraries - imagine decades of stuph written that you can tack on to your program. That in itself has got to be interesting.
"I've never seen such a large program from small amount of code"
That's unusual. I was of the persuasion it was capable of particularly speedy executables.
"have never been sure to know if other languages (such as Assembly) could be incorporated into it"
Modern versions could certainly have inline assembly code. Not sure about IBM Pro FORTRAN 1.0, F77 compliant, unlike MicroTrash's early versions. This was written by Ryan-McFarland. Already had the images, but obtained original disks and docs. O man what a haul.
Grace Hopper wrote COBOL, right? Figures a dame would write such a verbose language LOL. Did she write FORTRAN too. Or do I got it all backwards?
"Like Mr. Brutman said, it is a mathmatically based language, requiring classes in finite math(which I am taking..lol) and you'll need to be more familiar with your basic machine coding."
Neither the math nor the knowledge of the machine innards bothers me personally. I'll be playing around with it in the next few weeks probably. Next question, who's into C LOL LOL. I think I have (had?) Quick C around someplace. Haven't seen it around lately though