Pascal is a popular teaching language since it is sensitive to errors and order.

History

Pascal was created by Niklaus Wirth in the late 1960s, and was named after Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician who created one of the first adding machines.

What It Can Do

Pascal wasn't a very popular language due to its inflexibility and lack of tools, but many languages were based off of it.

For MS-DOS, Borland Pascal (also known as Turbo Pascal) was created.

There is, essentially, a Windows port of this, which is termed Delphi. Although it is very heavily biased towards Windows development, the underlying code is object-orientated Pascal.

There is also a package titled Free Pascal, available on different platforms ( http://www.freepascal.org ).