Why was Matlab written in C instead of Fortran?

Question

As you may know, Fortran is a language for scientific computing. however, the kernel of the most famous high level language for scientific computing has been written in C instead of Fortran. Why?

Answer 1

To answer your original question: Matlab was originally written in Fortran. But one of the first things that the creator of Matlab, Cleve Moler, and his partner did in 1983 was to rewrite the entire Matlab app in C:

Jack Little left his job at the consulting company and bought a new COMPAQ portable computer at Sears. The machine had only 256 KB of memory and no hard disc; Jack had to swap 5-1/4-inch floppies to compile programs. Jack and Steve took a year and a half to re- write MATLAB in C, adding new features they had envi- sioned. (The Growth of MATLAB and The MathWorks over Two Decades)

I think a more relevant question for today would be to ask: why did they switch to C back in 1983 ?

My guess is that C probably had certain features that Fortran did not have and thus the switch was more out of necessity and in the interest of code maintainability.

One killer feature missing in Fortran77 was dynamic memory allocation (Dynamic memory allocation was only added in Fortran90). Getting around that single limitation would be a horrible deal breaker in my opinion.

EDIT:

dmckee's answer has a great explanation of why using Fortran77 would be painful.