101 - Introduction to Pascal Programming
The Pascal programming language was originally developed by Niklaus Wirth, a member of
the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP)
Working Group 2.1. Professor Niklaus Wirth developed Pascal to provide
features that were lacking in other languages of the time. His principle objectives for Pascal were for the language
to be efficent to implement and run, allow for the development of well
structured and well organized programs, and to serve as a vehicle for the
teaching of the important concepts of computer programming. Pascal,
which was named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal, is a direct
descendent from ALGOL 60, which Wirth helped develop. Pascal also draws
programming components from ALGOL 68 and ALGOL-W. The original published
definition for the Pascal language appeared in 1971 with latter revisons
published in 1973. It was designed to teach programming techiques and
topics to college students and was the language of choice to do so from
the late 1960's to the late 1980's.
The Prime area of application that Pascal entails is the learning
environment. This language was not really developed to be used for
anything other than teaching students the basics of programming,
after all it was originally developed for this purpose.
In the early 1970's to the early 1990's Pascal was the language of
choice for most major colleges and universities for teaching college level programming techniques.
Now with the growing popularity of Object Orient Programming Pascal has
taken a back seat to other languages such as C++ and Visual Basic.