Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth and based on the ALGOL programming language, named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.
Prior to his work on Pascal, Wirth had developed Euler and ALGOL W and later went on to develop the Pascal-like languages Modula-2 andOberon.
Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming.[4] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal have also frequently been used for everything from research projects to PC games and embedded systems. Newer Pascal compilers exist which are widely used.[5]
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 originalMacintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources. The popular typesettingsystem TeX by Donald E. Knuth was written in WEB, the original literate programming system, based on DEC PDP-10 Pascal, while an application like Total Commander was written in Delphi (Object Pascal).
Object Pascal is still widely used for developing Windows applications such as Skype.[citation needed] A cross-platform version called Free Pascal, with the Lazarus IDE, is popular with Linux users since it promises write once, compile anywhere, development.
The original Standard Pascal was in many ways a different language from the Object Pascal that most people today are familiar with, being much simpler but also more limited.
Dr. Wirth himself did not intend Pascal for systems programming, and his ongoing language evolution were the languages Modula-2 and Oberon. Both languages are related to Pascal in a similar way as C++, C# and Java are related to C. Oberon-2 supports all concepts of object-oriented programming. In contrast to the C language family, in the course from Pascal to Oberon the language definition got a lot more compact, but the language itself got more powerful.
The successors of Pascal were developed to address the weaknesses of Pascal in this regard. However, with the widespread adoption of the Object Pascal extensions (e.g.. unit, bitwise operators), many of these weaknesses (most specifically the lack of support for separate compilation) were eliminated. The reputation of Pascal as a toy language has unfairly persisted in many places however.