Pascal creator and programming language pioneer Niklaus Wirth has passed away

Software pioneer Niklaus Wirth has passed away. He was the founder of nine programming languages, including Pascal. Wirth also won a Turing Award and was seen as one of the founders of modern programming.

The Swiss-born computer scientist died on January 1 this year at the age of 89, confirms technology institute ETH Zurich, to which Wirth was associated. Niklaus Wirth graduated there in 1959 and went on to earn a master’s degree from Laval University in Quebec and a doctorate from Berkeley in California. During that time he wrote two programming languages: Euler and PL/360 for the IBM 360. They were both based on Algol. Because of his work on those programming languages, Wirth was asked to work on a successor to Algol-60. In that capacity, Wirth wrote Algol-W, which he later converted into the better-known programming language Pascal, released by him in 1970.

Wirth worked on various other programming languages ​​in his later career, including Modula and Modula-2, and in 1987 Oberonwhich still received stable releases until 2020.

Niklaus Wirth was an influential figure in the world of programming languages. He was known, among other things, for wanting to write code as compact and efficient as possible. There he wrote various pleas for it.

In 1984, Wirth was the first and so far only German-speaking scientist to receive the award a Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computer science. The committee presented him with the award for his work on Euler, Algol-W, Modula and Pascal, and especially for his ‘foundation for future computer languages, systems and architectural research’.