How it began
Niklaus Wirth, born in Winterthur in 1934, took his first degree at ETH Zurich in the late 1950s and went to North America for graduate studies. He taught at Stanford University until 1968 and then accepted a position at ETH Zurich. There he developed a language to teach students good programming skills, basing it largely on ALGOL 60, which he had already extended as ALGOL W. He released it in 1970 and named it Pascal after the 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal.
Before it existed
The two languages dominant in academic programming at the time were Fortran, developed by IBM for scientific work, and ALGOL. Wirth was a vocal partisan of ALGOL 60 over Fortran. He believed that important principles were being neglected in the teaching of programming, and he held that increasing complexity was not the same as sophistication.
How it works
Pascal is a small, efficient language built to encourage structured programming and the structuring of data. Structured programming means taking a problem apart into ever smaller steps and organizing the instructions accordingly. Wirth also built in simplicity and discipline, in the sense of using standard methods instead of inventing undocumented extensions.
How it spread
Pascal was never meant to become a practical programming language, but it was easy to use and capable, and by the end of the 1970s it was widely used. Generations of students at universities around the world, including ETH Zurich, wrote their first programs in it. Apple used Pascal for the Apple II, Apple III and Lisa computers and later for many Macintosh applications. According to Wirth, the language was always better received in academic than in commercial settings.
What lasted
Wirth went on to develop Modula-2 between 1979 and 1981 and began Oberon in 1988, and an object-oriented version of Pascal appeared in 1985. Later languages such as Java and C# inherited characteristics of simplicity from Pascal and Modula-2. Wirth received the Turing Award in 1984 for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages. He retired from ETH Zurich in 1999 and died in Zurich on January 1, 2024.
