Pascal was a toy *(programming language) written by Prof. _(Nicklaus Wirth) to
teach how to compile computer languages on small machines of the early 1970's.
Unhappily it has been taken seriously by many people, who have built
great systems on such a shoddy language between the late 1970's and
early 1990's, including the cheap Turbo-Pascal that revolutionized
programming on personal computers in the 1980's, but also TeX that is
still widely used.

See _(Modula-2), _(Modula-3), and _(Oberon) for more serious successors of
Pascal. See also languages of the _(ML) family for well-designed modern
strongly-typed algebraic languages without absurd fascist limitations.
