Pascal for Not Yet Techies

Computer Careers: "The Only Programming Language You'll Ever Need"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Pascal began as a language in search of its purpose. Way back in 1968, the 2 "biggie" computer career languages were FORTRAN for scientific applications and COBOL for business applications. You just didn’t have much choice. Pascal was to be the all-purpose programming language.

A man named Niklaus Wirth must have decided there was no need to have 2 separate languages that aspiring computer career programmers had to learn. Keep it simple and learn just one language that could be used anywhere and everywhere. So he wrote the first Pascal compiler.

Pascal is a strong language that is good at a lot of things.

Pascal actually had its hands tied behind its back from the beginning, however, because its input/output capabilities are not as strong as COBOL’s or other business languages in use then. Therefore, it really had no chance of taking over from COBOL.

Pascal 's big edge was supporting "structured programming." Structured programming was invented in the late 60s as an effort by conscientious programmers to develop ways to write programs that are more clear and efficient.

Under pressure from bosses to get their programming jobs done yesterday, some Pascal programmers developed styles of programming that got the computer job done no matter what

No matter whether it was the most efficient way, whether anyone coming along behind them could easily understand their logic or – especially important – whether anyone coming along behind them could easily make the changes that would be needed in the future. All too often, programs were written in what’s known as "spaghetti code." Try to untangle that.

Basically, structured programming aims to avoid these problems by, well, "structuring" programs. It uses three concepts to that: Sequence, Decision or Selection and Looping. Build an efficient program with them, without jumping all around the place, and it will be much easier for programmers who need to modify your code later (including possibly yourself) to do so.

Anyway, these concepts of structured programming were deliberately built into Pascal so it would be nearly impossible to use it to write spaghetti code

This was bound to have a desirable effect on Management Information Departments of that time.

The popularity of Pascal expanded throughout the 1970s, but shrank during the 1980s. It is now rarely used in business and engineering. It is mainly a teaching tool. The introduction of C in the early 80s brought in overwhelming competition.

This is despite its heavy support by the PC company, Borland International, which released its first product in 1985, Turbo.

It was changed to Borland with the Windows version, and had an extensive package of Windows programming environment, much as Microsoft now has for Visual Basic. Borland’s effort to keep its "own" language alive, however, were not as successful as Microsoft’s for Visual Basic.

Pascal is still taught a lot in colleges, because educators feel that its built-in structured programming is good training for novices in computer careers. However, don’t expect to need to know it on a job.

Next: Delphi

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