Pascal Programming Nostalgia

What was the reasoning for transitioning from Pascal to C?

You can try Pascal. I switched from BASIC to Pascal 30 years ago then to C 5 years later. And even though C has been my everyday language for 2.5 decades for all my projects, Pascal was still the one that provided me the most natural mental model and that was the easiest to learn by practicing without lessons. I used to code as I thought without being interrupted thinking about stupid stuff like "I need a buffer to store this argument and to verify its length, ah shit I then need the abilit

At the time it appeared, it was more powerful than BASIC or COBOL. We learned Pascal in college and even the technically less inclined colleagues were able to do the assignments pretty well. We used Turbo Pascal, which had a decent IDE, my brother also continued to use Delphi for another ~ 10 years and loved it for being so easy to do some quick and dirty things when needed. Honestly I don't remember almost any details after 30 years, other than it was simple to use and quick to learn and w

Turbo Pascal in the early 90's was already quite modern, to the point C felt dated versus Turbo Pascal 6.0. :)

Pascal (Turbo/Borland) was the most most fun I had programming back then. The "Unit" of compiliation just worked (and yes it allowed only DAG-like dependency hierarchies). It was super fast to compile and use, but also to edit/debug.Then something got lost with Delphi, it's not that it was a bad product, but people started looking elsewhere...I still cherish the day, as Pascal gave me the headstart to C/C++ from Apple Basic, but also allowed me to start using

The reason we went for Turbo Pascal in the old days was the readability. ( it was C or Pascal )

I grow up with Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5. My machine was PC XT with 6 MHz, 0.6 MB RAM and 20MB hdd. Pascal had IDE which ran smoothly, supported mouse, could edit multiple files, copy&paste, had debuger, compilation took 10 seconds...And most importantly documentation was translated to my native language.C back than would have notepad (NCEdit), manual in english full of assembler and command line compiler.

I learned Pascal before C too :-)

Pascal was great when you were coloring within the lines, but C was more flexible. I don't think I was ever able to do image processing in Pascal, and I shudder to think what it would take to do a device driver.Pascal was my primary language from about 1980 to 1990, then I transitioned to C and from there to C++. I missed the whole Delphi train.

Pascal was a great language for this and still is.