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March 18, 2015

History of Pascal

In the honor of the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal Niklaus Wirth developed

a procedural programming language and named it Pascal. It was designed in 1968 and published

in 1970. It was intended to mainly teach students structured programming. For undergraduate

courses a generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language. Pascals variants have

been used frequently for everything from research projects to PC games. Newer versions of

Pascal compilers that exist are widely used as well. It is primary high-level language that was

used to help development in the Apple Lisa and early years of Macintosh. Pascal runs of a lot of

platforms until Windows, Mac OS, and different versions of UNIX/Linux. It has roots in the

ALGOL 60 language but it also introduces concepts and things that tenable programmers to

define their own complex.

Pascal is an easy language that doesnt require people to learn another language prior. It is

a language that helps you when you start learning the C programming language. The language is

similar in structure and syntax to the C programming language. Delphi is the object oriented

version and the successor of Pascal. Since it is a high-level language it is made up of all those

languages that are problem-oriented. If it were a low-level language it wouldnt be used as much,

as it would make it much harder for the user to understand the structure of the program. High-

level languages represent their source code so that it is more understandable for the programmer.

Since it is a high-level language it has its own source that needs to be translated into the

CPUs language, also known as machine code. These translators are also known as interpreters
and compilers. The compiler translates source code into object code. The interpreters are slower

than the compilers since it has to be loaded into memory till the end of the translation. In

comparison to compilers it is less practical. It is, however, helpful for correcting out errors in

programs, so its ideal for debugging. The compiler is faster since its single, complete translation

of the program into object code. It compiles the source code, with no syntax errors, and makes a

copy of it. The copy is called the object code and after is compiled it doesnt need a

recompilation. That is unless the source code is changed so it can make a new object code. This

object code is used by the OS to execute the program. It is a strongly typed language and it offers

extensive error checking, so it means that one type of data cant be converted or interpreted as a

different one without conversions.

The many implementations consist of Early Pascal compilers, Pascal-P system, Object Pascal,

Turbo Pascal, and other variants. The first Pascal compiler was designed in Zurich for the CDC

6000 series mainframe computer family. It was implemented in Fortran in 1969 and was

unsuccessful due to Fortrans inability to express complex data structures. The Pascal-P system

was made to propagate the language rabidly. A compiler parting kit was created in Zurich that

included a compiler that made a code for a virtual stack machine. A code that lends itself to

reasonably efficient interpretation. Apple Computer created its own Lisa Pascal for the Lisa

Workshop in 1982. They also ported this compiler to Apple Macintosh and MPW in 1895. Also

in 1985 Larry Tesler, with Niklaus, defined Object Pascal.

http://www.pascal-programming.info/index.php

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/pascal/pascal_overview.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_%28programming_language%29