Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal was developed on the pattern of the ALGOL 60 language. Wirth was involved in the process to improve the language as part of the ALGOL X efforts and proposed a version known as ALGOL W. This was not accepted, and the ALGOL X process bogged down. In 1968, Wirth decided to abandon the ALGOL X process and further improve ALGOL W, releasing this as Pascal in 1970. Pascal became very successful in the 1970s, notably on the burgeoning minicomputer market. Compilers were also available for many microcomputers as the field emerged in the late 1970s. It was widely used as a teaching language in university-level programming courses in the 1980s, and also used in production settings for writing commercial software during the same period. It was displaced by the C programming language during the late 1980s and early 1990s as UNIX-based systems became popular, and especially with the release of C++. A derivative known as Object Pascal designed for object-oriented programming was developed in 1985; this was used by Apple Computer and Borland in the late 1980s and later developed into Delphi on the Microsoft Windows platform. Extensions to the Pascal concepts led to the languages Modula-2 and Oberon. Much of the history of computer language design during the 1960s can be traced to the ALGOL 60 language. ALGOL was developed during the 1950s with the explicit goal to be able to clearly describe algorithms. It included a number of features for structured programming that remain common in languages to this day. Shortly after its introduction, in 1962 Wirth began working on his dissertation with Helmut Weber on the Euler programming language. Euler was based on ALGOL's syntax and many concepts but was not a derivative. Its primary goal was to add dynamic lists and types, allowing it to be used in roles similar to Lisp. The language was published in 1965. By this time, a number of problems in ALGOL had been identified, notably the lack of a standardized string system. The group tasked with maintaining the language had begun the ALGOL X process to identify improvements, calling for submissions. Wirth and Tony Hoare submitted a conservative set of modifications to add strings and clean up some of the syntax. These were considered too minor to be worth using as the new standard ALGOL, so Wirth wrote a compiler for the language, which became known as ALGOL W. The ALGOL X efforts would go on to choose a dramatically more complex language, ALGOL 68. The complexity of this language led to considerable difficulty producing high-performance compilers, and it was not widely used in the industry. This left an opening for newer languages. Pascal was influenced by the ALGOL W efforts, with the explicit goals of producing a language that would be efficient both in the compiler and at run-time, allow for the development of well-structured programs, and to be useful for teaching students structured programming. A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses.