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Niklaus Wirth

Swiss computer scientist who designed several programming languages, including Pascal.

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Niklaus Wirth

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Born in Winterthur, Switzerland on 15 February 1934, Niklaus Emil Wirth was a computer scientist of Swiss nationality.[1][2] Among the programming languages he created was Pascal, and in 1984 he was awarded the Turing Award.[1]

Last updated 2026-10-08 from the source article.

Life and work

In 1968 he became a professor of informatics at ETH Zürich.[3] He took sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in 1976–1977 and 1984–1985.[3] Wirth was a member of IFIP Working Group 2.1 on algorithmic languages.[4] He published his languages Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon as personal work after frustration with standards groups.[4]

Wirth contributed to the operating systems Medos-2 and Oberon and the Lola hardware design system.[5] He received the ACM Turing Award in 1984 and became an ACM Fellow in 1994.[6] Wirth obtained a B.S. from ETH Zürich in 1958, an M.Sc. from Université Laval in 1960, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.[2] He was the chief designer of nine programming languages: Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).[5]

The ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award was given to him in 1999.[7]

What the cited sources add

The Computer History Museum states Wirth became an assistant professor at Stanford's newly created computer science department upon graduation.[8] The Museum notes Wirth contributed to both hardware and software aspects of computer design and wrote influential books on software engineering.[8] After sabbaticals at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he became an enthusiastic adopter of the workstations he saw there and returned home inspired to build similar systems.[8]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Niklaus E. Wirth - A.M. Turing Award Laureate", Association for Computing Machinery, 2019 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Henderson, "Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology", Infobase Publishing, 2009, p. 514; ; ; ; Pomberger, "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", Gulf Professional Publishing, 2000, p. 6 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Jeuring, "Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1", Foswiki, 17 August 2016; Swierstra, "ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki", Foswiki, 2 March 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Petzold, "Programming Languages: Survivors and Wannabes", The New York Times, 9 September 1996; Pomberger, "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", Gulf Professional Publishing, 2000, p. 6; Wirth, "The Programming Language Oberon-07", ETH Zurich, Department of Computer Science, 3 May 2016; Knudsen, "Medos-2: a Modula-2 oriented operating system for the personal computer Lilith", ETH Zurich, 1983; Franz, "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", Gulf Professional Publishing, 2000, p. 42, 45; Proven, "The wild world en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Haigh, "Niklaus E. Wirth", A. M. Turing Award, 1984; "ACM Fellows by year", acm.org (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Niklaus Wirth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Outstanding Research Award", SIGSOFT (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  8. "Niklaus Wirth: 2004 Fellow", Computer History Museum (CHM). facts only, no text reused. computerhistory.org

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Niklaus Wirth (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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1. In what year was Niklaus Wirth born?

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Not quite. The answer is 1934.

2. In which place was Niklaus Wirth born?

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Not quite. The answer is Winterthur, Switzerland.

3. In what year did Niklaus Wirth die?

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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