Pascal was developed by the Swiss professor Niklaus Wirth in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wirth's idea was to produce a language that could be efficiently implemented on most computers and be suitable for teaching programming as a logical and systematic discipline - thus encouraging well-structured and well organised programs. This is considered to be one of most positive features of Pascal. The design of the language was influenced largely by ALGOL. The Pascal ISO standard was published in 1982.
Although introduced in the late 1960s, Pascal only started to be widely used in the late 1970s when many universities adopted it as their initial teaching language for computer science students. Pascal is often described as a "block structured teaching language". By the mid 1980s it had become the dominant teaching language. However, the use of Pascal has not been as widely adopted by industry. The greatest weakness of the language is that it lacks constructs which enable larger programs to be built up in a modular way. Further it is limited in its handling of text, and in its input and output facilities.
Pascal is standardised, both as a American standard (ANSI) and as an international standard (ISO). Even so, variants of the language have appeared in which certain additions have been made, for example UCSD Pascal and TurboPascal.
Because of the compactness of Pascal compilers the language is currently gaining further acceptance at the home computing end of the market where it has succeeded in challenging BASIC as the home computing language of choice.
The language is named after Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a French mathematician and philospher.
Created and maintained by Frans Coenen. Last updated 03 July 2001