Early computing languages such as ALGOL and FORTRAN were the center of attention in the mid to late sixties, and Niklaus Wirth, a professor of Informatics at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, was working on improvements to ALGOL 60. At the time he made some suggestions to the committee but they were ultimately rejected, and the next version ALGOL 68 was the complex and barely readable result. Wirth decided to continue on his own and created ALGOL-W, which he eventually developed into a language he called Pascal, named for the French mathematician, scientist, and religious writer Blaise Pascal.
Wirth wanted to create a language that would be a teaching tool that would demonstrate the concepts and ideas that were common to all languages. He wanted to avoid inconsistencies and unnecessary detail that was rampant in the languages of the time. He wanted this language to be a truly structured one, and have it easily ported to any computer so that more people could take advantage of it. Pascal included many things that ALGOL lacked, importantly the abilities of Input/Output (I/O) and character variables.
Pascal has certainly achieved its major goal as it is still taught in many universities as a first programming language. With the development of Turbo Pascal, designed to be used on the new and more powerful personal computers of the early eighties, it is probably going to be used for some time before it is completely replaced by such languages as C++, the up and coming preference for a first language.
Like other ALGOR type programs it is a block structured language, where sections of code can be considered independent of other sections in their function. It is an algorithmic language that uses the step by step process in the solution of problems and include loop iterations. It's variables are typed, or defined in advance and they are checked for consistency at compile time. It is a complied language and not an interpreted language.
Since Pascal was developed for more educational and experimental purposes, it was never intended to be an actual production language to be used in business or military applications. However when the Department of Defense decided it needed to define a single language and solicited industry to provide one, all of the contractors initially chosen based their language (Ada) on Pascal. This is a tribute to Niklaus Wirth's dedication to elegant and strict programming discipline.