It is an imperative, procedural, strongly typed language and a direct descendant of Algol (Algorithmic Oriented Language), the language Wirth was working on when he wrote the Pascal specification in 1968. The language was named after Blaise Pascal because the famous Pascaline, the first working mechanical calculator, can be seen as a distant ancestor of the computer. We might also imagine that Wirth's choice owed something to the fact that "Pascal" begins with "P," like "program," and ends in "al," like "Algol" or "algorithm."
Pascal compilers emerged in the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by Borland's hugely popular Turbo Pascal. It provided a development environment in which the program on screen could be run with a single click. No more separate compilation, linking and execution stages: that was revolutionary at the time! At last, programming was within everyone's reach.
Modula-2, LTR3 and Ada are direct descendants of Pascal, which was originally conceived as a language for teaching programming. Pascal is a simple language that follows the principles of structured programming: a program is built from procedures, themselves composed of conditional blocks (if ) and loops (repeat, for, while), which begin with the instruction "BEGIN" and end with "END." Pascal is strongly and statically typed: every variable has a type defined at compile time.
