What strikes me about (Turbo) Pascal is how good it is for introductory programming! Just think about it, I find it to be like mixture of BASIC-like structure with Pyhton-esque syntax.
Language in itself is very clean, and the way how static it is and how precise you need to be with declaring of variables is great for preparing you for C down the road. Then again you can do many things with it.
I remember writing my first serious apps in Pascal, (few hundreds LOC), it was basically CRUD app, but it talked to .txt and .bin files. I learned a lot about memory management, and it made me implement and really understand deeply many concepts like linked lists, sorting algorithms and work with strings (writing small parsers). I am very grateful for Pascal, and I think it changed me forever, in a way where I got in love with it and I got hang of lower level programming pretty early. After that when I went to C, I had to learn a lot but it felt so natural. It's funny that I find myself struggling with Python and JS (with JS I got better, Lisp and functional programming came in handy there), cause I just can't get used to the language giving you pretty much everything just by calling one simple method/function. Numbers of times I found myself writing function for something trivial that already exists in language by itself. Anyway, it felt great to think about old times and Pascal. I think it is very underrated as a learning language.
What I meant by that is that you had to do everything by yourself. Also it is very clean. For example removing element from the array is not as trivial as in Python.
Yeah that's not really BASIC-like at all, to me. It seems such an odd thing to say since Pascal was pretty much designed to be the anti-BASIC - a language for education but done 'right' through 'structured programming'.
Language in itself is very clean, and the way how static it is and how precise you need to be with declaring of variables is great for preparing you for C down the road. Then again you can do many things with it.
I remember writing my first serious apps in Pascal, (few hundreds LOC), it was basically CRUD app, but it talked to .txt and .bin files. I learned a lot about memory management, and it made me implement and really understand deeply many concepts like linked lists, sorting algorithms and work with strings (writing small parsers). I am very grateful for Pascal, and I think it changed me forever, in a way where I got in love with it and I got hang of lower level programming pretty early. After that when I went to C, I had to learn a lot but it felt so natural. It's funny that I find myself struggling with Python and JS (with JS I got better, Lisp and functional programming came in handy there), cause I just can't get used to the language giving you pretty much everything just by calling one simple method/function. Numbers of times I found myself writing function for something trivial that already exists in language by itself. Anyway, it felt great to think about old times and Pascal. I think it is very underrated as a learning language.