The name refers to the influential Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth.
Originally proposed by Niklaus Wirth in 1977 as an alternative to Backus–Naur Form (BNF), it has several advantages over BNF in that it can be defined using itself, it contains an explicit iteration construct, and it avoids the use of an explicit symbol for the empty string (such as
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After a sabbatical at PARC in 1984/1985, he developed conjointly with Niklaus Wirth the Oberon System based on the Oberon programming language.
Object Pascal is an extension of the Pascal language that was developed at Apple Computer by a team led by Larry Tesler in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal.
Since Niklaus Wirth went on to develop languages such as Modula and Oberon (where one could define a module before knowing about the entire program specification), one can infer that top down programming was not strictly what he promoted.