Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, which Niklaus Wirth designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970, as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. 

A derivative known as Object Pascal designed for object-oriented programming was developed in 1985, later developed into Delphi. 

Pascal, named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal, was developed by Niklaus Wirth. 

Before his work on Pascal, Wirth had developed Euler and ALGOL W and later went on to develop the Pascal-like languages Modula-2 and Oberon. 

Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming. A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal have also frequently been used for everything from research projects to PC games and embedded systems. Newer Pascal compilers exist which are widely used. 

Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and in the early years of the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources. The typesetting system TeX by Donald E. Knuth was written in WEB, the original literate programming system, based on DEC PDP-10 Pascal, while applications like Total Commander, Skype and Macromedia Captivate were written in Delphi (Object Pascal). Apollo Computer used Pascal as the systems programming language for its operating systems beginning in 1980.
What was it initially designed for?
Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming.