1934-

Swiss computer scientist who developed Pascal, a computer programming language that revolutionized programming on personal computers. Originally designed by Wirth as a "toy" to teach people how to write and compile programs, Pascal was simple and powerful enough to become popular, especially in the revised "Turbo Pascal" version. Wirth later developed the Oberon language, a more serious and powerful successor to Pascal, and Modula-3, an object-oriented programming language that was briefly popular.