Niklaus Wirth in the context of Pascal (programming language)

ALGOL 60 (short for Algorithmic Language 1960) is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a key advance in the rise of structured programming. ALGOL 60 was one of the first languages implementing function definitions (that could be invoked recursively). ALGOL 60 function definitions could be nested within one another (a feature introduced by ALGOL 60) with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other languages, including CPL, PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. Practically every computer of the era had a systems programming language based on ALGOL 60 concepts.

Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published. ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was criticised partially for being so, so that in general "ALGOL" refers to dialects of ALGOL 60.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the object – a software entity that encapsulates data and function(s). An OOP computer program consists of objects that interact with one another. A programming language that provides OOP features is classified as an OOP language but as the set of features that contribute to OOP is contended, classifying a language as OOP and the degree to which it supports or is OOP, are debatable. As paradigms are not mutually exclusive, a language can be multi-paradigm; can be categorized as more than only OOP.

Sometimes, objects represent real-world things and processes in digital form. For example, a graphics program may have objects such as circle, square, and menu. An online shopping system might have objects such as shopping cart, customer, and product. Niklaus Wirth said, "This paradigm [OOP] closely reflects the structure of systems in the real world and is therefore well suited to model complex systems with complex behavior".

ALGOL W is a programming language. It is based on a proposal for ALGOL X by Niklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60. ALGOL W is a relatively simple upgrade of the original ALGOL 60, adding string, bitstring, complex number and reference to record data types and call-by-result passing of parameters, introducing the while statement, replacing switch with the case statement, and generally tightening up the language.

Wirth's entry was considered too little of an advance over ALGOL 60, and the more complex entry from Adriaan van Wijngaarden that would later become ALGOL 68 was selected in a highly contentious meeting. Wirth later published his version as A contribution to the development of ALGOL. With a number of small additions, this eventually became ALGOL W.

In computer programming, a P-code machine (portable code machine) is a virtual machine designed to execute P-code, the assembly language or machine code of a hypothetical central processing unit (CPU). The term P-code machine is applied generically to all such machines (such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and MATLAB pre-compiled code), as well as specific implementations using those machines. One of the most notable uses of P-Code machines is the P-Machine of the Pascal-P system. The developers of the UCSD Pascal implementation within this system construed the P in P-code to mean pseudo more often than portable; they adopted a unique label for pseudo-code meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine.

Although the concept was first implemented circa 1966 as O-code for the Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL) and P code for the language Euler, the term P-code first appeared in the early 1970s. Two early compilers generating P-code were the Pascal-P compiler in 1973, by Kesav V. Nori, Urs Ammann, Kathleen Jensen, Hans-Heinrich Nägeli, and Christian Jacobi, and the Pascal-S compiler in 1975, by Niklaus Wirth.