Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth has died

Gaming IndustryPascal creator Niklaus Wirth has diedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Tyomitch (Wikipedia))

Niklaus Wirth giving a lecture in Ural State University (2005)

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported that Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist known as the creator of the programming language Pascal, has died at age 89.

Wirth was the designer of numerous programming languages through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but it was Pascal, released in 1970, that became his crown jewel. “Following his personal aesthetic, Pascal was simple, flexible and designed for rapid compilation into efficient code,” theACM websitesays. “It retained Algol’s code structures, logical completeness, and support for recursion, but stripped away some of its complexity and added support for complex and user-defined data types.

“Pascal’s great leap into mainstream use came a few years later, with the spread of personal computers. The simplicity and efficiency of Pascal made it a natural fit to their limited memory and disk space. Borland’s cheap and fast Turbo Pascal compiler cemented Pascal’s position as the leading high level computer language of the 1980s for serious personal computer software development.”

Ten years later, he was inducted as anACM Fellow, recognizing his “outstanding technical, professional, and service contributions” to the field of computer science.

(Image credit: Association for Computing Machinery (Twitter))

It is with great remorse that we mark the passing of programming language pioneer and A.M. Turing Laureate Niklaus Wirth, who passed away on Jan 1, 2024. Wirth developed a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA and PASCAL, which provided a foundation for future computer language, systems, and architectural research. https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/wirth_1025774

Wirth is also known for coining Wirth’s law in his 1995 essayA Plea for Lean Software, which says that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster—essentially a criticism of software bloat.

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I’m not a programmer, but I’m starting to feel like Wirth was my kind of guy.

Numerous people who are programmers took to Twitter to pay tribute to Wirth following the report of his death. Among them were Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, id Software co-founder John Carmack, and Apogee Software co-founder George Broussard, who shared some reminiscences about Wirth and Pascal on Twitter. “Wirth was the creator of Pascal, and part of the earlier Algol group that in 1957 defined the foundations of modern programming languages,” Sweeneywrote. “‘Power through simplicity, simplicity through generality’ was the name of the game. He made programming better for everyone.”

(Image credit: Tim Sweeney/John Carmack/George Broussard (Twitter))

Wirth was the creator of Pascal, and part of the earlier Algol group that in 1957 defined the foundations of modern programming languages. “Power through simplicity, simplicity through generality” was the name of the game. He made programming better for everyone.

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