Pascal is based on the ALGOL programming language and named in 
honor of mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. 
Wirth subsequently developed Modula-2 and Oberon, 
languages similar to Pascal.

Initially, Pascal was a language intended to teach 
students structured programming, and generations of students have "cut their teeth" on Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal are still widely used today, for example Free Pascal can be used in both 32 and 64 bit formats, and all types of Pascal programs can be used for both education and software development.

Parts of the original Macintosh operating 
system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 
assembly language from the Pascal code used in the 
Apple Lisa, and it was the primary high-level language used for 
development in the early years of the Mac. In addition, the 
popular typesetting system TeX was written by Donald E. Knuth in WEB,
 the original literate programming system using Pascal.