Pascal – ISO 7185

Pascal is a procedural programming language, designed in 1968–1969 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. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal was developed on the CDC 6000 series mainframe computer at ETH Zurich, and released in 1970. From the early 1980s, Pascal became the main language used for teaching programming in many universities. A derivative known as Object Pascal was used for developing Windows and Macintosh applications in the early 1990s. Delphi, a popular development environment for Pascal, was released in 1995. Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language with an extensive range of operators. It has been noted for its strong support for structured programming and data structuring. Pascal is also frequently used in competitive programming. The original Pascal standard was published in 1970. Pascal was extended significantly in a series of successive standards, published between 1983 and 1999, until the ISO 7185 standard was published in 1999. Pascal was designed with an eye towards teaching good programming practices, and as such it is a very structured language. All program code is organized into units called "modules". Each module has a clearly defined purpose, and there is a well-defined interface between each module and the rest of the program. This makes it easy to understand and modify large programs written in Pascal. Pascal is a very efficient language, both in terms of memory usage and execution speed. This is due in part to the fact that Pascal programs are compiled into machine code, which is then executed directly by the computer's CPU. Pascal is a versatile language that can be used for a wide variety of applications. It is particularly well suited for developing system software, such as operating systems and compilers. Pascal is an ISO standard programming language, which means that it is well-defined and portable. This makes it easy to write programs that can be run on any computer that supports the Pascal language.