There was already a relatively popular compiler called Pascal-2 back in the day from Oregon Software. It was a heavily extended Pascal for the PDP-11 and some

There was already a relatively popular compiler called Pascal-2 back in the day from Oregon Software. It was a heavily extended Pascal for the PDP-11 and some other contemporary platforms. I doubt that would have stopped Wirth from calling it that if he wanted to, but it was called Modula-2 instead for other reasons.