Niklaus Wirth, the creator of the Pascal programming language, dies

On January 1, 2024, Swiss programmer, programming theorist, and author of the Pascal programming language Niklaus Wirth died. He passed away about six weeks before his 90th birthday, writes The Register.

Niklaus Wirth is the author of many well-known works on programming. He is also the author of such programming languages as Euler, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon.

He was born on February 15, 1934, in Winterthur, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland. In 1954, he entered the Department of Electronics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Here, in four years, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

In 1960, he earned a master’s degree from Université Laval in Canada. Later, in 1963, he defended his dissertation at the UC Berkeley. His topic was the Euler programming language.

From 1963 to 1967, Niklaus Wirth worked as a research assistant at Stanford University. Here, together with Jim Wales, he developed and implemented the PL/360 language. He created the Pascal programming language in 1970.

In 1984, Niklaus Wirth received the Turing Prize, which is one of the most prestigious awards in the world of computer science.

Until 1999, he was the director of the Institute for Computer Systems at ETH. On April 1, 1999, Niklaus Wirth retired as he reached the age limit for Swiss state employee.