Evolution of Pascal: Education, Applications, and Modern Usage

TLDR; Pascal, a high-level language, was popular in the 70s and 80s, used for education and building applications. It's still in use today.

💻 Origin and Evolution

Pascal, a high-level programming language, was created by Nicholas Wirth in the late 1960s and named after French mathematician Blaise Pascal.

It became popular as the language of choice on Apple 2, Lisa, and Macintosh, and eventually became the default high-level language on nearly every PC.

Over the years, it evolved into various dialects, with Turbo Pascal being one of the most famous ones, introduced by CP Creator Anders Hejlsberg.

📚 Usage in Education and Applications

Pascal was extensively used in education to teach coding to people from the 70s and 80s.

It was also used for building serious desktop applications and games such as Crisis Mountain, Gravity Wars, and IBM's Alleycat.

In modern times, Pascal and its dialects, like Delphi, are still in use, and its syntax might be surprisingly familiar to many.

👨‍💻 Procedural Nature and Syntax

Pascal is a procedural language, where instructions are executed in a linear sequence, similar to the main function in many other languages.

It uses 'const' to define immutable global data and 'VAR' to define values that might change during the program's execution.

Variables are strongly typed, with a syntax that looks almost identical to TypeScript.

⌨️ Subprograms and Types

The main program in Pascal can be organized into subprograms, including functions and procedures, which are used to execute code or create side effects.

Pascal is also good at complex data structuring, allowing the creation of custom types for records, key-value pairs, and dictionaries.

⚙️ Building Executables

After writing the code, the executable can be built with the Pascal compiler, bringing together the complex data structuring, subprograms, and procedural nature of the language.