Pascal Programming Question:

Pascal is in the Algol family of languages. Algol, whose first version was called IAL or "International Algebraic Language", was the first language created by international committee. The resulting language was rather odd for its time. The committee had the goal of designing a unified computer language, but also saw Algol as a way to cleanly express computer algorithms, and so was not directly concerned with creating a practical language for compilation. That is, the language would serve a purpose even if it was only used for publishing algorithms, not running them.

This resulted in Algol not having many data types, or built in I/O. Also, Algol was generally free of the limits common to programming languages of that time, such as number of array dimensions. One of the goals of Algol was for it to be as close to mathematical notation as possible. In particular, Algol used a special operator for assignment, ':=', because '=' had a different meaning in mathematics.