Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science,[2][3] for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
Programming languages
Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languagesEuler, Algol W, Pascal,[6]Modula, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-07, and Component Pascal.
His article Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering. In 1975 he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition. Major revisions of this book with the new title Algorithms + Data Structures were published in 1985 and 2004. The examples in the first edition were written in Pascal. These were replaced in the later editions with examples written in Modula-2 and Oberon respectively.
His textbook, Systematic Programming: An Introduction, was considered a good source for students who wanted to do more than "just coding".
