Standard Pascal

Pascal User Manual and Report

In 1974 Springer-Verlag published a book, Pascal User Manual and Report, co-authored by Niklaus Wirth and Kathleen Jensen, that became a de-facto standard for the Pascal programming language.

ISO 7185

In 1983 the International Standards Organization (ISO) formalized the de-facto (with a few small differences) of the Springer-Verlag book standard as ISO 7185:1983. ANSI/IEEE released an almost identical standard with small differences, as ANSI/IEEE 770X3.97-1983. In 1990 ISO released an updated version - ISO 7185:1990 - that primarily cleared up ambiguities and corrected errors that were in the earlier version. Rather than update their standard document, ANSI/IEEE referred people to the new ISO standard document. The ISO 7185 standard is referred to as Standard Pascal. The standard defines the minimum level that a Pascal compiler must support in order to be a true compiler of the Pascal language. Ironically, the current Pascal compilers, Free Pascal and Delphi do not fully support ISO 7185, although the Free Pascal volunteer programming team is working to achieve full compatibility and plans to offer a compiler mode that will expect Standard Pascal compliant source code.

ISO 10206

Another ISO standard was created for what is referred to as Extended Pascal (leading some to refer to ISO 7185 as Unextended Pascal rather than Standard Pascal). It was released as ISO 10206:1991 (ANSI/IEEE has a similar, but not identical version: ANSI/IEEE 770X3.160-1989).