Pascal is a programming language based on ALGOL, named in honour of Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher and mathematician. Afterwards, Wirth developed Modula-2 and Oberon, which were languages similar to Pascal. Leading up to, and before Pascal, Wirth Developed a language named Euler and then after one named Algol-W.

Pascal was initially by and large intended to teach students structured programming. Generations of students have used Pascal as a language to introduce them into larger programming languages in undergraduate courses. Modified versions of Pascal have been frequently used for a large amount of things, such as: PC games and embedded systems.

For the development of the Apple Lisa, Pascal was the primary high-level language used, and in the early years of the Mac; parts of the original Macintosh operating system where hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources.

Object Pascal is still widely used for developing Windows applications such as Skype.