Niclaus Wirth

hardware

software

Pascal, Modula, Oberon

keywords
pascal

see also
programming languages

related subjects
software

Achievement

Creator of programming languages Pascal, Modula, Oberon and Euler

Biography

Niklaus Wirth, now 70, is being honored for his work in computer languages, namely for his development of Pascal. He also was involved in developing other highly influential programming languages such as Euler, Algol-W, Modula and Oberon.

Wirth, a native of Switzerland, received a degree in electronic engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1959 and then obtained a masters degree from Laval University in Canada and a Ph.D. from University of California-Berkeley in 1963.

Wirth became an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in 1963. In 1968, he returned to Switzerland, where he taught informatics at his alma mater until he retired in 1999. He also took a two-year sabbatical at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Chronology

Honors and awards

2004 Recognized as Innovator by the Computer History Museum

principal papers