Here's what Wirth wrote about it in retrospective, and yes it was explicitly designed as a teaching language with a syntax suitable for a recursive descent one

Here's what Wirth wrote about it in retrospective, and yes it was explicitly designed as a teaching language with a syntax suitable for a recursive descent one pass compiler http://youtu.be/5RyU50qbvzQ http://youtu.be/5RyU50qbvzQ