Transcription
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- US Pronunciation
- US IPA
- UK Pronunciation
- UK IPA
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- [pa-skal, pah-skahl]
- /pæˈskæl, pɑˈskɑl/
- /pæsˈkæl/
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- US Pronunciation
- US IPA
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- [pa-skal, pah-skahl]
- /pæˈskæl, pɑˈskɑl/
Definitions of pascal word
- noun pascal a high-level programming language, a descendant of ALGOL, designed to facilitate structured programming. 1
- noun pascal physics: unit of pressure 1
- noun Technical meaning of pascal (language) (After the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)) A programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970. Pascal was designed for simplicity and for teaching programming, in reaction to the complexity of ALGOL 68. It emphasises structured programming constructs, data structures and strong typing. Innovations included enumeration types, subranges, sets, variant records, and the case statement. Pascal has been extremely influential in programming language design and has a great number of variants and descendants. ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1993 is very similar to ISO Pascal but does not include conformant arrays. ISO 7185-1983(E). Level 0 and Level 1. Changes from Jensen & Wirth's Pascal include name equivalence; names must be bound before they are used; loop index must be local to the procedure; formal procedure parameters must include their arguments; conformant array schemas. An ALGOL-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favourite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: 9. There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed. People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, Fortran-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialisation, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by C) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds. See also Kamin's interpreters, p2c. 1
- noun pascal Blaise (blɛz). 1623–62, French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. As a scientist, he made important contributions to hydraulics and the study of atmospheric pressure and, with Fermat, developed the theory of probability. His chief philosophical works are Lettres provinciales (1656–57), written in defence of Jansenism and against the Jesuits, and Pensées (1670), fragments of a Christian apologia 0
- noun pascal a high-level computer programming language developed as a teaching language: used for general-purpose programming 0
- noun pascal the derived SI unit of pressure; the pressure exerted on an area of 1 square metre by a force of 1 newton; equivalent to 10 dynes per square centimetre or 1.45 × 10–4 pound per square inch 0
Information block about the term
Origin of pascal
First appearance:
before 1955 One of the 4% newest English words
First recorded in 1955-60; after Pascal
Historical Comparancy
Parts of speech for Pascal
noun
adjective
verb
adverb
pronoun
preposition
conjunction
determiner
exclamation
pascal popularity
A common word. It’s meaning is known to most children of preschool age. About 71% of English native speakers know the meaning and use the word.
Most Europeans know this English word. The frequency of it’s usage is somewhere between "mom" and "screwdriver".
pascal usage trend in Literature
This diagram is provided by Google Ngram ViewerTop questions with pascal
- what is a pascal?
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- how to convert pascal to bar?
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- how to pronounce blaise pascal?
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- how to use the pascal triangle?
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See also
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