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Pascal and related programming languages
1. ALGOL
In the 1960s, the primary programming languages (of many) were the following.
FORTRAN (IBM, for scientific programming)
ALGOL (Algorithmic language, popular in Europe, block scope modeled after mathematics)
COBOL (Common Business-oriented language, for business use)
LISP (Artificial Intelligence, still in use today as originally designed)
BASIC (late comer, became popular for mini and later micro computers)
2. Pascal programming language
Niklaus Wirth was the inventor of the Pascal programming language.
Based in ideas from ALGOL, with block scope, standard Pascal was a fine academic programming language that needed extensions to make it commercially useful.
Eventually, Niklaus Wirth developed a language called Modula-2 and then Oberon. Both were popular for a while but never developed a huge programmer base.
3. Code and data
Wirth defines programs as composed of data structures and algorithms (Wirth, 1975,
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs)
Data structures: data component
Algorithms: code component
Code can be data and data can be code. Von Neumann first recognized this principle.
4. Structured programming
In his book
Structured programming (1975), Nicklaus Wirth, inverter of the
Pascal programming language, popularized the idea of "
structured programming" where programs consisted of a hierarchy of single-entry single exit blocks without using the goto statement.
5. UCSD Pascal
Originally started in Zurich, the UCSD (University of California at San Diego) Pascal system used P-Code as in intermediate processor and platform independent code and become very popular.
Later, Java, C# (.NET), and other languages adopted this approach.
UCSD Pascal was an integrated system with editor and error location in the editor of detected issues.
Many later systems adopted this approach.
6. Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal was a fast and efficient Pascal compiler and editor system originally developed for
DOS (Disc Operating System) for the IBM PC. By the time Microsoft Windows started to become established, Turbo Pascal was already in decline.
Turbo Pascal, having previously introduced a module system, introduced classes and object about 1988.
Anders Hejlsberg is the coauthor of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of Delphi Pascal.
7. Aside
Borland's Turbo Pascal was not exactly standard Pascal. What happened is this. Borland started a Modula-2 project when it appeared Modula-2 would be the successor to Pascal. But after considering their large customer base of developers, business sense dictated that a more prudent approach would be to incorporate the new ideas of Modula-2 into Turbo Pascal, but maintain as much as possible the syntax of Pascal to keep compatibility with all of the old code.
8. Borland Delphi
Borland Delphi which is based on the Object Pascal programming language, successor to the Turbo Pascal programming system.
It provided a very nice visual programming system for creating GUI applications for Windows.
9. Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg was a coauthor of Turbo Pascal, inspired in part by the "
Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth's book "
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs".
Later, Anders became chief architect of the popular Delphi Pascal system.
10. Microsoft connection
In 1996, Anders was hired away from Borland by Microsoft. Starting with J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes, a few years later he became the chief architect of C# and a contributor to the .NET architecture.
In 2012, Anders started the Microsoft TypeScript language, a superset of JavaScript.
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