History of Pascal

Pascal is based on the ALGOL programming language and named in honor of mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Wirth subsequently developed the Modula-2 and Oberon, languages similar to Pascal, and earlier, also the language Euler.

Initially, Pascal was a language intended to teach students structured programming, and generations of students have "cut their teeth" on Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal are still widely used today, for example Free Pascal can be used in both 32 and 64 bit formats, and all types of Pascal programs can be used for both education and software development.

Examples of usage

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 traditional Pascal, while an application like Total Commander was written in Delphi (i.e. Object Pascal).