I think Pascal is the best programming language that I have ever used, but it is severely backtalked by C lobbyists. They have been lying about it for years. In reality, it has only one severe drawback: portability. That's because Borland refused to make their dialect conform with standards. But today we have FPC, cross-platform and modern!
For a long time, using Pascal was a fantastic competitive advantage for me, it made me so much faster than my C-using competitors. In recent years, the advantage is smaller since Pascal support has been dropped just about everywhere, my old professional tools are discontinued, but I still hope to get back on track with Free Pascal.
Switching to C/C++ doesn't seem like a good move to me. Then I would have no advantage against the rest of the crowd, nothing that can make me better except hard work. Pascal makes my code more readable, easier to maintain, faster to write, and executes on par with C. If it is a small language, no problem. Its qualities can be our little secret.
Concerning teaching, today's habit of using C/Java is plain madness. We should not iron in a single solution in the students, we should widen their scope with alternatives. pascal is a great language for teaching as for anything else, but let them start with C and try Pascal later. They just might get the point better in that order. :roll:
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) First we were taught with Turbo Pascal (i fall into that category), but around 2002-2003 they've switched to freepascal (i mean country-wide, not just my school). There is even some sort of 
Originally Posted by fragle
I'm serious though. Feldora Core is the result of the RedHat company --which Linus worked for for a time, btw-- trying to be all commercial like Microsoft. Linux and Microsoft are not good combinations. Hence the mess that is RedHat. Sure it's stable, great... but it's like some half breed thing that it's quite with the GNU standard anymore.
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