Computer programming language named for ALGOL .
It was developed by Niklaus Wirth of Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology in the late 1960s as an educational tool for systematic teaching of programming, with fast, reliable compilers . It was made available to the public in 1974 and was used by many universities for the next 15 years. Pascal strongly influenced languages developed later, such as Ada . Complex {{link=data structure">data structures and algorithms can be described concisely by Pascal, and its programs are easy to read and debug.