Pascal is a programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. According to ETH Zurich, Wirth designed Pascal in 1970 as a “small, efficient language” that “was intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring,” and notes that “it quickly became a popular teaching language” used by “generations of students at universities all over the world.”
The language grew out of the structured-programming movement of the 1960s. In his history paper, Wirth records that the ideas of E. W. Dijkstra and C. A. R. Hoare about structured programming and data structuring “had a profound influence on new programming languages, in particular Pascal,” and that with Pascal “structured programming became supported by a structured programming language.” In other words, Pascal was built to make disciplined program structure natural rather than optional.
Pascal favored a small set of clear concepts over a large feature list. It offered named data types, records, and clean control structures, and its readable style made program logic easy to follow. These qualities are exactly what made it attractive for teaching: students could learn good habits without fighting the language.
ETH Zurich’s group also built a portable Pascal compiler based on an intermediate code called P-code, which helped Pascal spread to many different machines. As Wirth describes in his history, that portable compiler approach later helped carry Pascal onto the new microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s, where, through products like Borland’s Turbo Pascal, it reached a mass audience far beyond the university.