Pascal: About

About

Pascal is a procedural programming language created by Niklaus Wirth and released in 1970. The name was in honor of French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. It was influenced by ALGOL and went on to influence Ada, Go, Java, Modula, Oberon, Object Pascal, among other languages.

Pascal was designed to be a small, efficient language that encouraged good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. Pascal was the go-to language for teaching a undergradute introduction to the programming courses in 1970s-1980s as Python is in the 2010s.

A number of variations of Pascal were subsequently created:

  • Pascal-P2, Pascal-P4, Pascal-P5
  • UCSD Pascal
  • Object Pascal
  • Turbo Pascal
  • Super Pascal
  • IP Pascal
  • GNU Pascal

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. In 1984 he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages. These languages included:

  • Algol W
  • Euler
  • Pascal
  • Modula/Modula-2
  • Oberon/Oberon-2/Oberon-07

In 1987, he was awarded the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE and in 2004 he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms. One of his dotoctoral students was Martin Odersky who created Generic Java and Scala.

Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Wirth