Pascal

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Pascal Mean?

Pascal is a procedural programming language that supports structured programming and data structures to encourage good programming practices. Pascal was originally developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth and is named after the famous French mathematician Blaise Pascal.

Advertisements

While Pascal is a reliable and efficient programming language, it is mainly used to teach programming techniques. In fact, it is the first language that many programmers learn. There are commercial versions of Pascal that are used, but in general, most developers favor Java, C#, C, C++, etc.

Techopedia Explains Pascal

Pascal uses control structures with reserved words which include if, then, else, while, etc. It also supports data structures and abstractions like records, pointers, type definitions, sets and enumeration. Similar to any other object-oriented programming language, Pascal also has special program structures and control statements. They start with the keyword "program" followed by the main block holding the begin and end statements. Data types permit a range of values a variable can hold and are capable of storing and defining a set of operations that can be performed on the data type. Predefined data types supported by Pascal are integer, real, char and Boolean. Pascal has certain unique types like the set type, and user-defined types are defined from other types using the type declaration.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.