Niklaus Wirth

Designer of the Pascal programming language

• Born: February 15, 1934
• Place of Birth: Winterthur, Switzerland
• Died: January 1, 2024
• Place of Death: Zurich, Switzerland

Primary Company/Organization: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

Introduction

Although famous as the originator of the Pascal programming language, Niklaus Wirth went beyond this achievement, developing the ALGOL-W and Modula 2 languages. He also served as an educator and philosopher concerning programs and programming practices. Espousing the view that increasing complexity is not synonymous with sophistication, became a prominent critic of certain programming languages such as C++. He is credited with developing the principles of structured programming, which examines a problem and organizes it into smaller units, providing a basis for writing code. According to Wirth, programming is a holistic process and should not focus merely on the coding but also how design determines how an application should be built.

Early Life

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on February 15, 1934. His parents were Walter, a professor of geography, and Hedwig Wirth. As a child, he built and flew model planes, later claiming that because of his limited budget, he had to be careful to construct the simplest and most easily repairable models, an experience that would inform his views on programming.

Wirth's undergraduate education was at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), where he would later become part of the faculty. After graduating in 1958 with a degree in electrical engineering, he moved to North America, where he stayed for several years. Wirth received his master's degree in 1960 from Laval University, located near Quebec City in Quebec, Canada. Wirth then moved west, to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1963.

Wirth's first faculty position was at Stanford University, at its Computer Science Department, where he taught until 1968. He then accepted a position at his old school, ETH Zürich. It was there that Wirth would embark on his career as a developer of programming languages and lead teacher of the discipline of computer programming.

Life's Work

By the time Wirth returned to ETH Zürich, he had already given a great deal of thought to software languages: what was desirable and what ought to be avoided. Among the languages available at the time, there were two that had reached a position of dominance, at least in academic programming. One of these was Fortran (which stood for "formula translating"), developed by IBM for scientific work, and the other was ALGOL (for "algorithmic language"). When Wirth was at Stanford, ALGOL had gone through at least two major revisions: ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. The latter was released in 1960 and had several vocal partisans, among them Wirth. Wirth was convinced of the superiority of ALGOL 60 over Fortran, and in the late 1960s, when he decided to develop a language that would teach students good programming skills and principles, he based it largely on the ALGOL 60 model. Students at Stanford later recalled the vehemence with which Wirth discussed the superiority of ALGOL over Fortran.

Only in the rarest of cases are programming languages created from scratch. Many languages are based on predecessor languages, such as C++ (which is built on C) and Kristen Nygaard's Simula (which, like Wirth's language, was based on ALGOL 60). Simula had introduced the concept of object-oriented programming and also influenced Wirth (although an object-oriented version of his language, Object Pascal, would not be developed until 1985 and he would not be the one to develop it). Similarly, later programming languages such as Java and C# have characteristics (in terms of simplicity) inherited from his languages Pascal and Modula 2.

When Wirth began serious development of his new language, he had already developed one, ALGOL-W, that was an extension of ALGOL 60. The purpose of this new language was not to be a development tool; rather, its purpose was to teach students how to program using the principles that Wirth believed were being neglected or represented innovations that would improve the results of coding. These principles included his idea of structured programming, drilling down and decomposing a problem into ever smaller steps and organizing instruction sets based on this granular approach. Wirth would also incorporate other aspects of his philosophy into the new language, including simplicity, discipline (in the sense of using standard methods and not inventing new and possibly undocumented extensions), and the good design of planning and execution and not merely the syntax and values for entering commands.

Wirth's new language, released in 1970, was called Pascal for the seventeenth-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal. It was never meant to become a practical programming language like its predecessor ALGOL. It became so popular, however, and had such a wide range of capabilities, while being easy to use (and to design with), that by the end of the 1970s, Pascal was widely used. Apple was among the companies that used Pascal, notably for the Apple Lisa, Apple II, and Apple III computers and later for many applications for the Apple Macintosh. The Motorola 68000 processor in Apple computers used a version of Pascal as its assembly language. Pascal also came to be used in developing some Windows programs (Object Pascal) as well as some video games. According to Wirth, the language was always better received in academic than in commercial environments, however.

From 1979 through 1981, Wirth developed another major programming language, Modula-2. In the 1980s he worked at both the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Stanford in developing languages and expanding their capabilities as well as suggesting modifications to hardware. In 1985, an object-oriented version of Pascal was introduced, providing the capabilities of object orientation to his original language. In 1988, Wirth began work on Oberon, an object-oriented language based closely on his earlier work on Modula (which, in turn, had been based on Pascal). In 1995 Wirth released a paper that popularized a concept that eventually became known as Wirth's law: that while hardware is becoming faster, software is becoming slower at a quicker pace.

One of Wirth's significant, if little known, contributions, is the Alt key that appears on computer keyboards. In working with the early Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-1, Wirth wanted to add input capability that would allow the operator a greater range of commands based on pressing multiple keys (such as Ctrl-Alt-Delete) simultaneously. The result was the addition of the Alt key, which is now located to the left of the space bar.

Personal Life

Wirth not only was active as a researcher and as the world's foremost developer of computer languages but also was engaged in other aspects of life at ETH Zürich. He chaired the institution's computer science department twice, the first time from 1982 to 1984 and later from 1988 to 1990. Wirth retired from ETH Zürich in 1999 but remained active as a writer and researcher.

Wirth received many honors, the most prestigious being the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1984. He was presented with the Emanuel R. Piore Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Wirth subsequently received other awards from IEEE and ACM and was presented with honorary degrees from the University of York and the Lausanne (Switzerland) Institute of Technology.

Wirth and his wife, Nani, had three children together: Tina, Chris, and Carolyn. He and Nani divorced in 1959. He married Diana Pschorr Blessing in 1984. She died in 2009.

Wirth, who was a grandfather and great-grandfather, died of heart failure at his home in Zurich on January 1, 2024.

Bibliography

"Niklaus Wirth." Computer History Museum, 2019, www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/niklaus-wirth/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.

Rosenwald, Michael S. "Niklaus Wirth, Visionary Software Architect, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 4 Mar. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/niklaus-wirth-dead.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Wirth, Niklaus. "A Brief History Of Software Engineering." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30.3 (2008): 32–39. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 July 2012.

Wirth, Niklaus. "Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass." Computer 39.1 (2006): 28–39. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 July 2012.

Wirth, Niklaus. "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement." Communications of the ACM 14.4 (1971): 221–27. Print.