Pascal is the programming language Niklaus Wirth designed and published in 1970 as a simpler successor to ALGOL 60.
Wirth developed Pascal in 1968–1969 and published a description in 1970. He designed it to encourage structured programming and to support teaching, while still being suitable for writing substantial programs. The language was named after Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher.
Pascal introduced or popularized features including user-defined types, enumerations, records, sets, and pointers within a relatively disciplined syntax. The UCSD Pascal system helped spread the language in education and on early personal computers.
Turbo Pascal, released by Borland in 1983, made Pascal especially popular for fast, affordable development on DOS computers. Pascal is often confused with Delphi: Delphi is a later programming environment and Object Pascal-based language descended from Pascal.