Pascal
programming language, which was based on the ALGOL computer language,
was developed in the late 1960's and was named after Blaise Pascal — a
French mathematician, responsible for a series of discoveries and who
also invented the first calculator (called Pascaline) in 1645.
Considering that Pascal died in 1662 and that the Pascal language was
invented almost 300 years later, he can’t possibly have created the
language. Then who invented the Pascal programming language?
Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth, who was born on February 15, 1934
in Winterthur, Switzerland to Walter, a geography professor, and Hedwig
(Keller) Wirth. Niklaus developed the Algol-W which was implemented on
one of the first IBM 360 (which was as large as a room) and used it as a
base for the development of the Pascal language a few years later.
Pascal was created by Wirth as a language that could be used for
teaching fundamental concepts that would work reliably and efficiently
on the computers available in the 1970's. Pascal ended up being used for
computer games, embedded systems and research projects, and was also
used for the development of the Lisa,
one of the early Apple (Macintosh) computers and one of its
derivatives, Object Pascal, is still used today, in applications such as
Skype.
Niklaus Wirth is the author of highly recognized books, such as
“Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs” (1976) and has received ten
honorary doctorates and was awarded the IEEE Emmanuel Piore Prize and the Turing Prize
in 1984 among many others, but Wirth’s main contribution has always
been the concept of creating productive software designed in an
organized fashion and free of unnecessary clutter.
In his article named “A Plea for Lean Software”
[PDF] which was written by Wirth in 1995, he explains some of the
issues with software development and why it’s important to create clean,
organized code by quoting two “laws” that he believes reflect the
business:
- Software expands to fill the available memory. (Parkinson)
- Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. (Reiser)
Interesting ideas, considering the number of lines of code of some of
the most used software today, seems to be growing larger even as the
hardware grows smaller each day. For example:
- Basic had 4,000 lines of code in 1975, now it has over 2 million.
- The first version of Word had 27,000 lines of code. The current version of Office has over 30 million.
- Mac OS X is made of about 90 million lines of code.
- Windows 95 was made of 15 million lines of code, Windows 7 is made of over 50 million lines of code.
- A single game application for the iPhone, such as the “Unreal” game app has over 2 million lines of code.
He has stated that the only reason software has become large is
because software vendors add features customers think they want, but
never use. He was also a proponent of the idea that software should be
completely understood by at least one person, and that having teams
developing programs without any of them fully understanding its entirety
caused a lot of unnecessary complexity and useless code.
His development of Pascal was a testament to those beliefs. Pascal is
still considered one of the most mathematical of computer languages.
Its core is designed around focus on essentials, object oriented
programming and keeping a simple core that is lightweight and easily
understood.