Nicklaus Wirth's Lecture - Computer Museum
Scott Moore, Pascal Advocate

Nicklaus Wirth's Lecture - Computer Museum

Oct 20, 2004
Pictures and descriptions by Scott A. Moore

Below are some pictures taken from Nicklaus Wirth's lecture at the Computer History Museum in Mt View, California. Wirth was made a fellow of the museum.

A transcript and a video should be available of the lecture, which you can check on at the Computer History Museum's web site.

One of the questioners from the Q&A session turned out to be D. E. Knuth!

His question was if Pascal was originally conceived as a non-recursive language! Wirth replied that it was true, that the original machine he planned to run Pascal on was not ideal for recursive languages, but they worked it out, and there never was a non-recursive version of Pascal.

Wirth was asked after the lecture what he thought of the rise of C/C++. He said he was very glad that subject had not come up during the Q&A period, which I think says it all. I asked him how he felt about the computing professions move away from type safe languages like Pascal to languages like C/C++. He replied that he believed the profession was moving back in the other direction, via languages like Java and C#.