History of Pascal

Origins Pascal grew out of ALGOL, a programming language intended for scientific computing. Meeting in Zurich, an international committee designed ALGOL as a platform-independent language. This gave them comparatively free rein in the features they could design into ALGOL, but also made it more difficult to write compilers for it. Those were the days when many computers lacked hardware features that we now take for granted. The lack of compilers on many platforms, combined with its lack of pointers and many basic data types such as characters, led to ALGOL not being widely accepted. Scientists and engineers flocked to FORTRAN, a programming language which was available on many platforms. ALGOL mostly faded away except as a language for describing algorithms.