Preface
This book is intended for both beginners and advanced users. As a beginner, you can learn the Pascal language through examples and step-by-step procedures. You start with simple programs that crunch numbers and end up with structured programs and advanced problem-solving algorithms. As an experienced programmer, you can use the book as a complete reference that covers the language and the advanced programming techniques.
Historically, Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth (a Swiss computer scientist) in the early 1970s and was named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A recent standard for the language was formulated in 1983 and approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). With the growing use of microcomputers, extensions and variations have been added to the language. The most popular of these variations are UCSD Pascal (developed by University of California at San Diego) and Turbo Pascal (developed by Borland International).
The goal of this book is to teach you how to write a portable program in Pascal regardless of the computer you use. Mainly the standard IEEE/ANSI language is used, but the new features are discussed and their origins referred to. This book is not intended to go into the details of the nonportable areas of the language (such as graphics), but rather to make use of the powerful features of the modern implementations that help in data processing. The programs included in this book were compiled using Turbo Pascal, but you can use any compiler to run them. In a few places you may need to make minor modifications, which will be referenced. If you are using a Windows-based compiler (such as Delphi), you have to use the console mode to compile the examples of this book. For your convenience, both the source files and the executable files are included on the companion CD. Therefore, you have the option to either compile the source files or take a sneak peek at the programs' results without compiling them.