Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is a historically influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.

A derivative known as Object Pascal designed for object-oriented programming was developed in 1985.

History

Pascal, named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, was developed by Niklaus Wirth.

Before his work on Pascal, Wirth had developed Euler and ALGOL W and later went on to develop the Pascal-like languages Modula-2 and Oberon.

Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming. A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal have also frequently been used for everything from research projects to PC games and embedded systems. Newer Pascal compilers exist which are widely used.