Pascal Language

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 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 was designed for object-oriented programming. Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth and based on the ALGOL programming language, named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Prior to 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.

Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and in the early years of the Mac. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources. The popular typesetting system TeX by Donald E. Knuth was written in WEB, the original literate programming system, based on DEC PDP-10 Pascal, while an application like Total Commander was written in Delphi (Object Pascal).

Object Pascal is still widely used for developing Windows applications such as Skype.

Index from wikipedia