Pascal

Pascal is a high level (3rd generation) programming language designed for simplicity, in reaction to the complexity of ALGOL 68, and intended as a teaching language.

To quote an ACM Citation "PASCAL has become pedagogically significant and has provided a foundation for future computer language, systems, and architectural research.". Its a language which has had its greatest impact on teaching programming, rightly serving the purpose for which it was built. It's expressiveness and simplicity make it a must-know for all computer science students. Named after the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, who built a working mechanical digital computer, it truly is a classic computer programming language. It may not be all that fun to program in it with all the cool languages around but it is worth noting that Pascal is one of the most structured languages which empahsizes on orderly, disciplined and error-free programming. It is a culmination of several decades of research and has greatly influenced the design and evolution of many other languages, from Ada to Visual Basic.

It all started with Algol - one of the first high level languages, intended for scientific computing, with a readable, structured and systematically defined syntax. Algol lacked several important data types such as pointers, chars etc and towards the end of the 60's the need for a new successor to it was felt. Several languages have been derived from Algol and they are collectively referred to as the Algol Family, Pascal being the youngest of them all and the most successful one too.

Pascal was defined in 1970 by Prof. Niklaus Wirth (a member of the original group that created Algol) at ETH Zurich ,the Swiss Federal Institute Of Technology. Pascal left out some of the obscure features of Algol and added capabilities to define new complex data types based on existing simpler data types. It also added support for dynamic data structures. One of the main reasons for Algol's unpoplularity was the lack of compilers for different platforms. Wirth avoided such a problem by creating a compiler which generated an intermediate platform-independent object code called p-code, interpreted by a virtual machine or converted to native code by another program. So only the virtual machine or the object-code-to-native-code converter had to be written for any platform instead of writing a new compiler for each one.

The designer of Pascal, Niklaus Wirth was part of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) team. This group was created to continue working on the development of ALGOL. C.A.R. Hoare and Wirth proposed additions and modifications to the language, but the group rejected their proposals and adopted a more complex revision.
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Because Pascal was originally developed as an educational language, it was limited in several areas. The lack of input/output facilities is the most critical, and there is no standard provision for the handling of text strings. But, the inherent power of Pascal proved its value to system developers and the results were many extensions to the Pascal language. One of the most popular was Borland's Turbo Pascal. Other versions were developed for varying operating system platforms including Macintosh, Atari, Unix, mid-range and main frame computers.