Niklaus Wirth
Kamberlin King
Mississippi Valley State University
Kamberlin.King@mvsu.edu

Niklaus E. Wirth was born on February 15, 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He was a major aspect of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Wirth is best known for creating or designing various programming languages. One of his most famous creations is Pascal. He is also popular for the Wirth’s Law and inventing several topics in software engineering. After Wirth obtained his first degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he left for graduate school in North America and earned a Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley [1]. After graduating, Wirth became an assistant professor at Stanford, in their newly created computer science department. While at Stanford, Wirth developed the programming languages Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. Pascal was invented in 1970. Pascal was invented by Wirth as a small and effective language made to improve good programming practices used for structured programming and data structuring. The first Pascal compiler was designed in Zurich for the CDC computer family, and it became operational in 1970 [2]. Modula was invented in 1975, and the main purpose for its invention over Pascal was because of its module system, which is a system used for grouping sets of related assertions into program units. Wirth created Modula-2 in 1978. Modula-2 was an alteration of Pascal to serve as the chief programming language for the operating system and application software [3]. In 1984, Wirth won the Turing Award for creating a sequence of innovative computer