The Pascal programming language is named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal and was written primarily as a language for teaching and learning programming. Pascal is a high-level COMPUTER LANGUAGE designed largely by Niklaus Wirth at Zurich in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was named for the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Its original design embodied modern ideas on the structure of computer languages so that it could be used to teach good programming practices. Based on ALGOL, Pascal contains many improvements, particularly in the way it organizes data. Standard Pascal omits some useful features, and most recent versions therefore contain extensions to the language. Unfortunately, most of these extensions are incompatible with one another, so that a program written for one machine may fail to run on another.