Pascal

<Niclaus Wirth>

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n.a.

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Description

A development of the ALGOL idea is the language called Pascal.

PASCAL was developed by NIKLAUS WIRTH of the ETH Technical Institute of Zuerich in 1970-1971.(published in 1973) and is gaining on BASIC in importance mainly on educational institutions. PASCAL was standardized by ISO in 1983. The name of the language is a tribute to the French mathematician Blaise Pascal who in 1652 at age of 18 invented the first mechanical calculating machine. Pascal is a development that came after it was decided that Basic did not answer to the needs of structured programming. Pascal is a block - structured language where the whole program is built up from a series of program blocks. It is a more stylistic language, and maybe because of that not too attractive for the amateur programmer who stands at the brink of a programming adventure. Unlike other high-level languages Pascal does not produce a machine code program after translation, but instead produces a programme in an intermediate language called 'p code'. There are many Pascal dialects under which the USCD Pascal p-system, an interactive Pascal interpreter that offers excellent portability for applications software. Generally Pascal is written to function like a compiler. Modern dialects are providing a linker to compile the p-code into machine code. This utility often is offered built-in in the editor. (see compilers).

Pascal, named after Blaise Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth in the late 1960's. It was released in 1970 and after a slow start, it became one of the most widely used languages in introductory programming classes. A committee was formed by IFIP in order to develop a language that bridged the gap between scientific and commercial programming. The language provided a disciplined approach to structure and data description.

Language Specifications

see above

Chronology