From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
pascal
n 1: a unit of pressure equal to one newton per square meter
[syn: {pascal}, {Pa}]
2: French mathematician and philosopher and Jansenist; invented
an adding machine; contributed (with Fermat) to the theory of
probability (1623-1662) [syn: {Pascal}, {Blaise Pascal}]
3: a programing language designed to teach programming through a
top-down modular approach
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) [jargon]:
Pascal
n.
An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600
around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This
language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in
the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming
point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and
Ada (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). The hackish point of view
on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan
way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame)
entitled Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, which was
turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via
photocopies. It was eventually published in Comparing and Assessing
Programming Languages, edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani
(Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here,
because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years
of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other
bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://
www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the
case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:
9. There is no escape
This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its
limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when
necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time
environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that
defines the ?standard procedures?. The language is closed.
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap.
Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group
extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever
language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation,
FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables,
initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the
utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to
others.
I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its
original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable
for teaching but not for real programming.
Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by {C}) from the niches it
had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its
role as a teaching language by Java.
From German-English FreeDict Dictionary ver. 0.3.3 [fd-deu-eng]:
Pascal /paskal/
pascal
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