User:Arny/Pascal history
Work in progress!
ALGOL origins
The oldest direct ancestor of Pascal is ALGOL, also known as IAL (International Algorithmic Language). The language was designed for describing algorithms, and from that purpose came the code readability most of its descendants (like Pascal) are famous for. The first standard was ALGOL 58 (or IAL 58, in 1958.), the next was ALGOL 60, from which Niklaus Wirth developed the language ALGOL W as a candidate for the next ALGOL standard, but a different language version was accepted for ALGOL 68. That standard has significantly expanded the language, but some concluded that its complexity has considerably increased too. For that reason many people still continued using ALGOL 60 for its cleaner and simpler syntax. Many languages continued the ALGOL 60 legacy, and Pascal was among them.
Niklaus Wirth
After ALGOL W, Wirth worked on an ALGOL-like language with a clean syntax and designed for structural programming - Pascal. Named after the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, the language was released in 1970. Wirth used it as a teaching aid because of its clean syntax and enforcement of good programming practices. That contributed to its popularity because many people learned it in school, but the other side of the medal was that many people also spurned the language for serious programming, deeming it to be a "toy language".
Other than ALGOL 60 and ALGOL W, Wirth used elements from other ALGOL-like languages like Simula, from which would some more elements borrowed in creating Object Pascal.
UCSD and Apple Pascal
Perhaps one of the most significant earlier implementations was the USCD Pascal developed at the UCSD, San Diego in 1978. It has ran on the p-System, an OS and virtual machine that directly ran Pascal programs compiled to bytecode (p-code). The language was expanded and UCSD Pascal influenced both Apple Pascal and later, Turbo Pascal. Apple Pascal was available for Apple II and III, and later it was used for development of the OS for the Apple Lisa, and also available for the Macintosh. During that time, Apple created object oriented versions, first the Pascal-based language Clascal, and later expanded the Pascal language thus creating Object Pascal.
Standardization
Pascal has been standardized two times. First standard was ISO 7185 in 1983, which was created by refinement of Wirth's specification from 1974, and is respected by most compilers. The other one, ISO 10206 from 1990, also called "Extended Pascal" is not as popular and very few compilers implement it fully.
