Pascal is an imperative language from the Wirthian family created in 1969. It was widely used in engineering and teaching in the 1970s and 1980s. It lives on in compilers as Free Pascal and Delphi.
Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1969 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language. It was largely (but not exclusively) intended to teach students structured programming and data structuring.
Pascal is a descendant of algol, but it was implemented on a wide range of architectures, from PDP-11s, IBM PCs, to CDC Cyber and IBM System 370 mainframes. Pascal probably reached critical mass around the time Borland released Turbo Pascal in 1983.
Wirth later developed Modula-2 and Oberon and those languages share much of Pascal's design. Other derivatives include OOP-based Object Pascal (used in Delphi and Lazarus/Free Pascal).
Pascal is a purely procedural language and includes control statements with reserved words such as if, then, else, while, for, and so on. However, Pascal also has many data structuring facilities and other abstractions not included in ALGOL 60 like type definitions, records, pointers, enumerations, and sets.
External Resources
- The Pascal Language
- ISO 7185 Standard Pascal
- Free pascal (Open source compiler for Pascal and object pascal)
- UCSD Pascal/p-System from the University of California, San Diego
- Wikipedia article on UCSD Pascal and the p-System
