3 PASCAL was invented in the late 1960's by Prof. Niklaus Wirth of Zurich as a tool to teach students proper programming structure before their brains became hopelessly warped by Basic. The syntax of Pascal practically forces programmers to write neat, structured, well-mannered code.

Pascal would probably have faded into disuse had not a young Swede named Anders Hejlsberg designed a Pascal programmng environment for the personal computer. This eventually became Turbo Pascal, the flagship product of Borland International, and a mid-1980's programming craze.

Though Borland's best corporate days may now be behind it, throughout the last decade, the company has kept Pascal alive through several incarnations. The most recent is Delphi, a popular object-oriented programming environment for Windows. Delphi competes with Visual Basic, but appeals more to people who hate Microsoft and prefer not buying its products.

4 C was developed in the early 1970's by Dennis Ritchie of AT&T Bell Laboratories in connection with the development of the Unix operating system. By the mid-1980's, it was ready to become the most popular programming language for personal computers. Virtually all the early applications for Windows and for the Apple Macintosh were written in C, and many still are. C is a terse, elegant, deceptively simple language that allows programmers almost unlimited flexibility. It appeals to the macho intincts of young and wild PC hackers, as well to the puzzle-solving impulses of more mature programmers, because of its power and ther variety of ways to sovle problems.

Alas, because C is so powerful, it's almost impossible to write a bug-free program in C. Allen Holub, a programmer and author, gave one of his books on C programming the title ''Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot.''

People often ask, ''How did it get the name C?'' Answer: It was derived from an earlier, little-used language called B.

5 C++ C++ (prounced ''C plus plus'') is an extension of C developed by Bjarne Stroustrup of Bell Labs in the early 1980's. C++ extends C by adding ''objects.'' In object-oriented programming, objects are reusable computer codes that fuction as the basic building bloks of programs. In theory, the use of objects makes program code easier to maintain and reuse, although no one has actually shown this to be true. C++ is currently the language Microsoft encourages for new Windows programs.