Standard Pascal

In 1982 standard ISO 7185:1983 was published, followed by American standard ANSI/IEEE 770X3.97:1983. In 1989 ISO standard was revised to fix several errors and ambiguities found in the original version, and the ANSI-standard was replaced with a link to the updated version ISO 7185:1990. The final version of these standards is sometimes referred to as ISO 7185 (without noting the year), but more often as Standard Pascal.

This standard formalizes the original language designed by Wirth and described in “The Pascal Report” (1974), without adding anything new. This is due to the fact that originally Pascal was designed and thought through very carefully and needed no improvement at the moment of standardization.

The following language features were clarified in the standard compared to “The Report”:

• when a function takes another function as a parameter, the declaration of the first function must contain full declaration of the second one.
• function parameters can be both values and VAR.
• standard procedures and functions can’t be passed as parameters.
• compatibility of complex types is tightened up.
• limit for length of symbols removed.
• interprocedure GOTOs can target only outer level of blocks (you can’t enter a procedure by GOTO).
• control variable in a FOR loop must be local.