Concept in Definition ABC

Of the languages ​​of programming There are some that are more difficult and others that are easier, more similar to the structure of natural language or less. Pascal's case is in the middle, easy to learn and powerful enough to do everything you need in one computer.

Pascal is a programming language developed in the late 1960s for educational purposes but which enjoyed great popularity at early and mid-90s with tools that placed it at the forefront of languages ​​used for application development commercial

Devised by the Swiss professor Niklaus Wirth for the use of his students, it was baptized by its creator as Pascal in honor of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, of whom Wirth was an admirer.

It is a strongly typed language and structured. The first (typing) means that you have to define the data types for the variables, that is, declare their name a priori and decide if that identifier is going to contain a number, a text and of what type are these elements going to be.

That it is structured means that it uses structures to control the flow of the program, such as functions and procedures.

The difference between these is that a function always returns a value, whereas this is not necessarily so in the case of a procedure.

Borland's products (Turbo Pascal and Delphi) gave Pascal its maximum popularity in the early / mid 1990s, declining a posteriori in favor of other languages ​​such as C / C ++ or Java

There is no reason clear technical for this, maybe just the fact that the app building tools in Pascal didn't dig deep and advance enough to challenge other languages, and that Borland (the main champion of the language) lost steam against competitors of the stature of Microsoft.

This caused that, little by little, Pascal and all its variants were losing prominence in the panorama of application development.

Even today we have Pascal programming tools for most operating systems, both free and paid, even for the most modern purposes such as the development of apps mobiles on Android. However, its use is minority in the field of development professional.

What does a program look like in Pascal? Well in this way

program HelloWorld;
begin
writeln ('Hello world')
end.

As we can see, with only one reading and without necessarily having to understand a lot of programming, we can see how a program is “declared”, given a name, defined a beginning, an action (in this case, the instruction writeln corresponds to a screen print), and a final.

It is thanks to this facility that if I had to recommend a programming language to start learning, I would opt for Pascal since in addition to being born with this intention, it is easy to capture the essences of programming through its use and, subsequently, jump to another language with a greater number of users and more libraries and utilities to our scope.

Photos: Fotolia - hanss / maciek905