The Association for Computing Machinery has reported that Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist known as the creator of the programming language Pascal, has died at age 89.
Wirth was the designer of numerous programming languages through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, but it was Pascal, released in 1970, that became his crown jewel. "Following his personal aesthetic, Pascal was simple, flexible and designed for rapid compilation into efficient code," the ACM website says. "It retained Algol’s code structures, logical completeness, and support for recursion, but stripped away some of its complexity and added support for complex and user-defined data types.
