Pascal Now is a site devoted to Pascal programming. It has a growing body of information on the Pascal language, development platforms, and applications. The information is believed to be accurate, but there are no guarantees ...
The first description of Pascal was published by Niklaus Wirth in a 1971 article, followed in 1973 by a book. This original version of Pascal was almost strongly typed, and was intended as a tool for teaching programming. Pascal was, in fact, widely used in universities in the 1970's and 1980's.
Wirth was a member of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) group which was charged with the development of the ALGOL programming language. This led to the development of the ALGOL-68 language. In the meantime, Wirth and C. A. R. Hoare developed the ALGOL-W dialect of ALGOL at Stanford University. The design of Pascal was based on ALGOL, and incorporated the RECORD structure (ala COBOL), but was easier to learn and to use than ALGOL.
Pascal is a language which is simple but powerful, and relatively safe.
Pascal compilers were written for most of the mini computers of the 1970's and 1980's, but the popularity of Pascal soared after Borland release Turbo Pascal in 1983. The core compiler had been written by Anders Hejlsberg of Denmark, who became a Borland employee, and was the architect of Borland Pascal through the third version of Delphi. Turbo Pascal was an easy to use compiler which sold at an affordable price. It produced programs which ran much faster than the interpreted BASIC which came with DOS, and included the capability of producing graphics. The Turbo version somewhat relaxed the typing rules of strict Pascal, making it easier to use, with some cost of reduced safety.
The popularity of Pascal has waned somewhat. Borland no longer supports Turbo Pascal, but the Delphi system is based on a dialect of Pascal. Freeware and shareware compilers, including Free Pascal, Alice Pascal, Virtual Pascal, and Pascal X are available.