Pascal was easy to teach, and it covered a wide spectrum of applications, which was a significant advantage over Algol, Fortran, and Cobol. The Pascal System was efficient, compact, and easy to use. The language was strongly influenced by the new discipline of structured programming, advocated primarily by E.W. Dijkstra to avert the threatening software crisis. post 
Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day, roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday. register
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I maintained Wirth's Pascal compiler when I worked for the Purdue Computing Center and continued writing Pascal code on my first home computer after moving to Oregon in the late '70s. See Pascal
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"A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built." pdf