Nikolaus Wirth and PASCAL.
On February 15 1934 Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Emil Wirth was born. He is best known for designing several programming languages including Pascal and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. If there is (or better 'was') one programming language that I really loved in the same way I hated it, then it was Pascal. On the one hand it was a rather easy to understand beginners programming language but when trying to build 'real world' software projects based on Pascal most of them in my experience were doomed to fail. The largest project based on Pascal that I was involved with was a 2 mio lines of code near realtime application for the military back in the 1990s Everybody knew, we better should have chosen Ada or C++ but it was not our decision to use Pascal Believe me, you wouldn't like to maintain 2 mio lines of Pascal code Nevertheless, the concept of the language designed by Niklaus Wirth was a great achievement for computer science “A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.” (Niklaus Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1934. In 1959 he earned a degree in Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (an M.SC. from Laval University (and a Ph.D in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley (Upon graduation, Wirth became an assistant professor at the newly created computer science department at Stanford University Then in 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH Zürich where he stayed until his retirement in 1999 It was at the ETH Zürich where he developed the programming languages Pascal (Modula-2 (and also Oberon (Pasca was by far the most popular of them and became a widely used programming languag in computer-science education. It influenced a generation of students and professional programmers. The basis of the development of Pascal was the programming language Algol-W and the desire to have a language that would satisfy the requirements of system design. The peculiar simplicity and beauty of a Pascal program can easily be demonstrated via 'Hello World': The first Pascal compiler was designed in Zurich for the CDC 6000 computer family, and it became operational in 1970. Already in 1972 Pascal was used in introductory programming courses. Wirth has contributed to both hardware and software aspects of computer design and has written influential books on software engineering and structured programming. He received the ACM Turing Award for the development of these languages and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. Niklaus Wirth also popularized the so-called Wirth's law a computing adage in 1995 It states a simple fact that should give us computer scientists a lot to think about:"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster." (