Getting Familiar with the Programming Environment Pascal

Ch A1

Summary of key points

1. What is Pascal?
a. Pascal is a general purpose programming language designed to teach structured
programming.

2. Writing your first Pascal program

a. Reserved words carry special meanings and they are reserved for use by Pascal only.

b. A comment is anything that a programmer would like the reader to know about, but
the comment will not be compiled and executed. A comment begin with { and end
with } or enclosed by (* and *).

c. Identifier is a series of characters making up of letters, digits and underscores ( _ )

and it cannot begin with a digit and contain spaces. Identifiers in Pascal are not
case sensitive, i.e. uppercase and lowercase are considered to be identical.

d. A Pascal program consists of the program heading, declaration part and statement
part. The statement part is the main body of the program, which starts with the
reserved word begin and ends with the reserved word end and followed by a period
(.).

e. Any violation of rules in writing program is a syntax error, which must be corrected
before the program can be run. An attempt to eliminate the error is called
debugging.

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