Niklaus Wirth: what else is the creator of the Pascal language known for?

Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth has died. He is best known as the creator of the Pascal programming language. How the scientist’s career developed is in the Kommersant certificate.

Niklaus Wirth was born on February 15, 1934 in Winterthur (Switzerland). He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Laval University (Canada) and the University of California at Berkeley (USA), where he defended his thesis on the Algol programming language.

Since 1963, he worked on the committee of the International Federation of Informatics (IFIP), which was involved in the standardization of the Algol programming language. At that time, it was widely used to describe algorithms in the scientific literature. Niklaus Wirth, along with Oxford University researcher Charles Hoare, proposed a version with minimal changes called Algol W. They kept popular features and eliminated those that were poorly implemented. As a result, the IFIP committee preferred a more complex option called Algol 68. After its release, it remained unclaimed due to redundancy and unreliability.

From 1963 to 1967, Wirth was engaged in research and teaching at Stanford University (USA), and from 1968 to 1999 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he created and headed the Department of Computer Science. As a teacher, Wirth took two year-long vacations, during which he worked at the Xerox PARC laboratory in California.

In 1971, Wirth introduced a description of the new programming language Pascal. He developed it based on a discarded version of Algol W. Pascal was originally intended as a language for teaching students, but in the 1990s, due to its simplicity, it became one of the most popular algorithmic languages ​​in the world. In particular, Pascal formed the basis of the popular Turbo Pascal compiler from Borland, the Object Pascal and Delphi programming languages.

In 1979, ETH researchers led by Wirth created a 16-bit personal computer with four sets of Am2901 integrated circuits called Lilith. In total, ETH students assembled 60 Lilith computers and connected them to an Ethernet-based network. According to ETH staff, Lilith turned out to be “a complete computing environment with an operating system (Medos), a high-speed local network, applications such as text and graphics editors and laser printers.” Wirth’s group developed the Modula-2 programming language specifically for the new computer. Subsequently, OS/400 for IBM AS/400, compilers for personal computers PC, Macintosh, IBM RS/6000 workstations, IBM and SGI mainframes were written in the Modula-2 language.

In 1984, Niklaus Wirth was awarded the Alan Turing Award, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in computer science, for the Lilith computer, Pascal and Modula-2 languages. Among other things, Wirth worked on the Medos and Oberon operating systems, the Euler, PL360, Modula, Oberon, Oberon-2 and Lola programming languages.

According to colleagues, Wirth’s programming languages ​​are distinguished by their simplicity and conciseness. Wirth himself called his life’s goal to develop “a language that is as powerful as possible, but at the same time as simple as possible.” In 1995, he formulated a humorous thesis criticizing software bloat: “Programs are getting slower much faster than computers are getting faster.” The statement later became known as “Wirth’s Law.”

In April 1999, Wirth retired, and one of his last jobs at ETH was working on an experimental drone computer. He created an on-board computer and programmed it so that the amount of energy consumed by the drone was reduced by about ten times.

Wirth was a member of the national academies of Switzerland, the USA and Germany. In June 2007, he became an honorary doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences.