Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth is a renowned computer scientist who is best known for designing the Pascal programming language and his 1976 book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs.

Wirth was born on February 15, 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He graduated from ETH Zurich in 1959 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained a Masters Degree from Laval Univerity in Quebec, Canada in 1960 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. After graduation Wirth was an assistant professor in the new Computer Science department at Stanford University from 1963 to 1967. After Stanford Wirth taught for a year at the University of Zurich and then moved in 1968 to teach at his alma mater, ETH Zurich. He remained at ETH Zurich, with the exception of two sabbaticals at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, California (1976-1977 and 1984-1985) until his retirement in 1999 at the age of 65.

Wirth designed a handful of other languages besides Pascal, but none ever came close to the usage that Pascal has had. The Modula and Oberon family of languages built on Pascal and added features that Pascal lacked with regard to large programming projects. Wirth's languages:

• Algol W (based on Algol X that he did with Tony Hoare)
• Euler (with Helmut Weber)
• Modula
• Modula-2
• Oberon
• Oberon-2
• Oberon-07