Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal, which was first published in 1970.
Wirth created Pascal as a small, structured language that encouraged clear programming practices and supported teaching. It was named after Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher who built an early mechanical calculator in the seventeenth century.
Pascal became particularly influential in education during the 1970s and 1980s. Its strong typing, structured control flow, and readable syntax made it useful for explaining algorithms and data structures. Turbo Pascal later helped popularize fast Pascal development on personal computers.
Pascal is sometimes mixed up with Modula-2, another language designed by Wirth, but Modula-2 came later and extended several of his ideas. Ada also emphasizes structured and strongly typed programming, yet it was developed for different large-scale software requirements.