Editing Pascal (programming language) (section)

===Rising popularity in the 1970s and 1980s===
In the two decades after 1975, Pascal gained increasing attention and became a major programming language for important platforms (including Apple II, Apple III, Apple Lisa, Commodore systems, Z-80-based machines and IBM PC) due to the availability of UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Crespo |first1=Diego |title=Pascal: The language that almost took over the world part 1 |url=https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/pascal-the-language-that-almost-took?utm_source=publication-search |website=www.deusinmachina.net |access-date=4 January 2025 |language=en}}</ref>

Despite initial criticisms, Pascal continued to evolve, and most of Kernighan's points do not apply to versions of the language which were enhanced to be suitable for commercial product development, such as Borland's [[Turbo Pascal]]. As Kernighan predicted in his article, most of the extensions to fix these issues were incompatible from compiler to compiler. Since the early 1990s, however, most of the varieties seem condensed into two categories: ISO and Borland-like. Extended Pascal addresses many of these early criticisms.  It supports variable-length strings, variable initialization, separate compilation, short-circuit Boolean operators, and default (<code>otherwise</code>) clauses for case statements.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://pascal-central.com/ppl/chapter3.html#Extended |title=Extended Pascal |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151018023934/http://www.pascal-central.com/ppl/chapter3.html |archive-date=2015-10-18 |access-date=2015-10-17 }}</ref>

Some of the problems arising from the differences in the implementations of Pascal were later partly solved by the advent of Free Pascal, which supports several dialects with mode directives.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Crespo |first1=Diego |title=Pascal: The language that almost took over the world part 2 |url=https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/pascal-the-language-that-almost-took-56a?utm_source=publication-search |website=www.deusinmachina.net |access-date=4 January 2025 |language=en}}</ref>